Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on? - <AUTHOR> What's an area that people think is up and coming?  (e.g. like social networks were in 2004, mobile apps in 2010, or vlogging in 2014)<p>I've finished several projects simultaneously and I'm looking to work in an area with lots of users, but as yet few producers. Wouldn't even need to involve programming, but probably would need to be online, as I'm pretty introverted! <comment><USER4> In the online world, it seems like there are two big things happening right now:

\- Neural networks / ML (eg GPT-2) Definitely nowhere near its potential for being applied to a wide variety of areas. Find a niche you like and apply there.

\- Security / Privacy (eg Telegram) Rapidly growing demand pretty much everywhere. Bonus points if you can make your product great for standard users and at the same time hackable/customizable for people who want to do that. Capitalize on both legs of the pareto distribution.

That all being said, if you are ambitious and talented without an all- consuming passion for software, I highly recommend you find something you can work in hardware. Since the '70s or so most industries have been basically frozen, besides computer hardware/software. Yet in the meantime materials science and engineering design has advanced considerably, both of which form the basis for innovation in new technologies. This is why SpaceX was able to build components for 10-100x cheaper than the leading suppliers in the early 2000s.

I work at a startup in nuclear fission, particularly because this tech is at <1% of its potential right now. The same could be said for many other areas.

Here's some ideas you might find interesting, that I think could work in the next decade or so: \- Supersonic air travel \- Electric air travel \- Nano/micro-scale metallurgy and materials for industry \- Biological materials \- Gut/microbiome \- Genetic engineering \- Nuclear fission / fusion \- Carbon capture \- Cross-laminated timber (CLT) for construction \- Indoor farming / optimizing farming in general \- Synthetic meat / meat alternatives

<comment><USER5> The most pressing problem for humanity is global climate disruption. Arguably, working on anything that doesn't help there is not just wasted effort, but actively harmful.

Wind, solar power, energy storage still have huge room for improvement.

Direct solar or wind -> liquid fuel will be essential to adapting fast.

Windmills can drive production of liquid ammonia on farms (needing only air and water inputs), for use directly as fertilizer and fuel, without need for a grid attachment and without blocking sunlight needed for the plants. Ammonia is not a very dense fuel (e.g. terrible for aircraft), but that doesn't matter for farm machinery.

Direct solar -> hydrogen has been demonstrated, with bio-reaction for hydrogen + CO2 -> liquid fuel suitable for aircraft. Direct hydrogen-fueled aircraft are feasible, and more efficient than with kerosine, but the design cycle is too long.

Wind turbines will be wearing out as the blades erode. No-moving-parts screens might be the next generation, extracting power by releasing ions to be carried away from an electric field. The old towers will still be useful, and the rare earths can be mined out for other uses, probably vehicle motors.

Batteries are a very material-intensive storage medium. Underwater air storage does not need exotic materials or tech, and the pressure at depth makes the strength of materials needed minimal, other than piping.

We need to replace huge amounts of refrigeration equipment with versions that don't rely on HFCs, and get the HFCs incinerated. One gram of HFC traps as much heat as 2500 g of CO2, and lasts centuries in the atmosphere. Once vented, it cannot be recaptured. Ammonia-cycle systems need to be made safe enough for general use, and HFC versions outlawed.

Without massive progress in the next decade, civilization will probably collapse by 2035.

<comment><USER6> > The most pressing problem for humanity is global climate disruption.

Our climate and ecology are certainly at risk, but I think the biggest threat in the world right now is the rapid rise of fascist China. They're challenging the notion that free speech and democracy are required for capitalism and economic gain.

China has grown so emboldened under President Xi that they're no longer content to just alter or buy out our media companies. They're flat out dictating marching orders to Western organizations and asking for employees that oppose their mandates to be fired. They're kidnapping foreign nationals and holding them hostage on trumped up charges. They've grown beyond stealing our ideas - now they're trying to supplant them.

That doesn't even begin to capture the things they're doing within their own borders. Surveillance state, social credit, travel limitations, Uyghur detention camps, supposed organ harvesting, Hong Kong / Tibet / Taiwan, ... In China it's actually 1984, and they're teaching the world that it works. If they win this battle, I worry we might wind up facing similar prospects in our future.

> Without massive progress in the next decade, civilization will probably > collapse by 2035.

That's a little bit overblown. Want to make a bet on longbets.org? I'll happily donate to a green cause.

<comment><USER7> Everything you fear about the rise of fascist China was far worse under the USSR in the latter 20th Century, and in fact far worse in China during that time too.

I'm not intending to downplay the impact on minorities within China, or their growing global influence. It's just that what China is doing is fundamentally the same category of human and national behavior we have seen for 100 years. Relatively speaking, it is less destructive than what came before. We must address it but the tools to do so are available and obvious.

It pales before the threat of climate change because that is a new category of threat to global society.

Why? Because water, food, and real property are fundamental to the health and economies of all nations, and climate change will create massive unfunded changes to those. It's one thing to have an aggressive nation on the world stage a la China. It's quite another if hundreds of millions of people need to migrate and have no money to do so. The latter is well within the realm of possibility given what we know about climate change.

<comment><USER8> What is the point of the human race surviving if it turns into some 1984-like dystopia with cameras in my house making sure I pledge allegiance to Emperor Xi's portrait every morning or my social credit score plummets?

Give me the climate (or nuclear) apocalypse, instead, please.

<comment><USER5> Humanity never had a point. It just is. Humans will survive everything imaginable, in much reduced numbers.

There were once 100M people in the Amazon basin, wiped out by plagues brought by Europeans 5 centuries ago. A few survived. The trees growing in unchecked in the depopulated Americas reduced CO2 enough to cause a mini ice age.

That won't be enough to bring down temperatures in the next collapse because the CFCs and HFCs won't go away. But at least the oceans will get less acid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm gonna go in a different direction: broadly, solutions that deal with the problems of an aging population:

1\. Technology that helps doctors/practices service more elderly patients

2\. Wellbeing technology for seniors (Headspace/Calm should totally push towards this area)

3\. Personnel management for homecare nursing

List could go on and on. None of this is especially "trendy" but there's clear demographic reasons to build startups in this area and there's going to be a natural onramp of capital & solutions for how to care for a radically older population are going be sorely needed.

<comment><USER10> A tool for children to remotely manage parents' phones, tablets, routers and (may be) computers would be nice to have. My parents are not very tech savvy and when something goes wrong getting someone to fix it takes forever. If I had remote access I'd do it in just a few minutes.

<comment><USER11> My solution to this is loading them up with iOS and macOS devices, enabling iCloud backup, and having them live near an Apple store for hardware issues.

They can click on all the shady links they want, but I haven't had to field tech support in a long time.

<comment><USER12> I've had pretty good experiences with handing them Linux machines (usually openSUSE + Xfce). There's an initial adjustment period as they figure out "okay the orange fox replaces the blue e", but quite a few people I know who made that switch are now at least reasonably productive. Chromebooks are another option here that I've seen be pretty successful, and they have the advantage of being absurdly cheap.

The absolute biggest bang for the buck: ad-blockers. Fewer sketchy links to click on, and absolutely nothing to relearn.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Unpopular opinion: Domain driven stack.

We have been living in the golden era of software industry, thanks to Moore's law. We were able to afford RISC (= general purpose CPU arch), general purpose operating systems, general purpose languages, general purpose databases etc all because the hardware was going to evolve and get faster anyway.

Now with Moore's law showing signs of death, the future for better computing would be domain driven stack. A quick thought experiment will be that: cloud applications will be written with cloud-friendly languages, using cloud friendly databases, on cloud-ready operating systems and processors that are architected for heavy cloud workloads. Much like how gaming was relying on custom stack for performance (GPUs, play station, X-box, etc)

The advent of TPUs by Google is a symptom of this pattern too. Of course, personal computers with general-purpose-everything will keep existing, but the business industry will start shifting towards domain driven stack slowly and steadily for obvious reasons.

<comment><USER14> Not sure what more recent xboxes are like, but the original xbox was a cut down windows 2000 running on Intel and Nvidia. It was really close to commodity hardware and software.

<comment><USER15> the current Xbox is running a Windows 10 (one kernel design) while the PS4 run a patched up FreeBSD.

Only Nintendo bothers with writing custom kernels, and historically Sony with the PS2 having exotic "Cell" processor units.

<comment><USER16> You mean PS3? It had the CBE.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Maybe this is not the answer you're looking for: but I think CRISPR-Cas9 seems like the most exciting technology probably in all of science. It's a system that can be used to literally change the DNA of living creatures, and on top of that it's highly accessible. Think of the hacker culture today and now imagine the same rate of change for biological engineering.

We'll have massive libraries of re-usable "components" for interesting DNA- sequences. People will slowly slice together more complicated features, and freely trade organic components with each other via post. At some point in the future electronics will catch up to bioengineering, leading to better ways to make changes to DNA. We'll eventually be able to change DNA in something like a "biology IDE" and have usable components printed out the other end. After that point, our world probably won't look anything like it does today.

It won't be long before someone decides to give themselves glowing skin or super strong muscles (and people have already tried the latter!) I for one welcome our super-human overlords.

<comment><USER18> > I think CRISPR-Cas9 seems like the most exciting technology probably in all > of science.

I tend to agree. However, having spoken at length about this with a friend doing her PhD, there are a few _major_ problems between now and then.

\- Scope: if you thought Big Data (relating to human _behavior_ ) was a massive endeavor (still very much not solved, not by a long shot), try genetics. We're talking orders of magnitude Bigger Data. We have the PoC but finding practical solutions remains a hard problem as we speak (needle in a haystack).

\- Money: Bio-sectors don't pay software engineers enough to compete with the tech sector (almost no one does), and bio-experts are generally not good enough at it. So there's a huge lack in terms of dual [SE skills + domain knowledge] experts for this category of problems. Research funding is massive in big (private) pharma and comparably non-existent in basic research — and for now, CRISPR-Cas9 is mostly the latter.

The first problem (resources) will probably solve itself as time goes by (assuming some Moore's Law continuation however it's done), however the second problem (domain / education politics? Idk how to call it) could virtually be forever — academia and big pharma aren't exactly known for being fast movers or innovators, let alone disruptors. Especially when CRISPR-Cas9 is a direct threat to well-established revenues in the trillions — curing whatever is much less profitable than selling drugs to ease symptoms over a lifetime.

If this sounds like somptuous irony, it's probably because it is.

<comment><USER19> > We have the PoC but finding practical solutions remains a hard problem as we > speak (needle in a haystack).

One of my former lab mates was doing his thesis on some fluorescent cancers screening stuff, somewhat similar. In his presentations, he'd use a slide explaining the order of magnitude issues in finding cancer cells this way. To illustrate this he'd explain it wasn't like finding a needle i a haystack, but more like trying to find a 20-gauge needle in a Walmart filled with 19-gauge needles.

>Bio-sectors don't pay software engineers enough to compete with the tech sector (almost no one does), and bio-experts are generally not good enough at it.

I've a fair amount of programming (enough to be really dangerous), so other students would come to me with help every once in a while. One of my friends getting his PhD in neuroscience traded a case of beer for an afternoon in helping him. He was doing some vision research with gerbil and was trying to time neuron spikes with some images on a screen. By the 32nd nested 'if statement', I requested another case of beer.

Generally, research-grade programming and software is, at best, spaghetti. At worst, you get answers that you think are right, but are wildly off. You can really lie to yourself, and the rest of the world, when you publish those errors as facts. Most grad students are learning programming by the seat of their threadbare pants, and it shows.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Crypto.

And no, I don't mean applying blockchain to everything, or internet money that just goes "up and to the right".

I mean the new applications of distributed systems research and cryptographic primitives that allow for highly composable, highly trustworthy, permissionless, autonomous machines.

MakerDAO, Arweave, the whole field of open finance (aka "DeFi"), and so many others collectively are very likely to change the fundamental assumptions we make when using software.

Here's a great talk regarding trustlessness: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0rZcpfF5dU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0rZcpfF5dU)

<comment><USER21> I think the people behind "trustlessness" should have chosen a better word. When people that are not familiar with crypto hear trustless, they can associate the solution with the common definition: "not worthy of trust; faithless; unreliable; false". I.e. the solution isn't reliable. I realize that the people behind it are trying to apply the world trustless to the problem they are solving, but that is definitely not clear from the quick soundbites people read.

source: [https://www.dictionary.com/browse/trustless](https://www.dictionary.com/browse/trustless)

<comment><USER22> Yeah I was thinking more "Provable".

<comment><USER23> Maybe 'trustification'? A novelish term for novel concepts around creating trust where it wouldn't otherwise be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> ML for healthcare. The whole industry is so far behind everything else, it is not even funny. Problem is, Just like Airbnb or Uber, the biggest road blocks are not technological, they are organizational and political. It is entirely possible, we might need some major privacy / security related leaps in ML to convince the medical industry to adopt it fully.

ML in movies and rendering. Deep Fakes is just an amateur's tech demo. In a few years, I expect to see render rights actually become a thing. Like, you don't act in the movie, but give a company rights to use a 3d render of you in it.

real time and full time holograms / AR. With remote work becoming a thing, I see a huge market for full 3d renders of the person presenting or even completely virtual AR work places where people check in to work. Maybe not for a decade or two, but whoever builds the flagship product will make a ton of money.

<comment><USER25> Healthcare tech has been the "next big area" for the past 40 years. Maybe this time is different, but historically it never pans out. Healthcare's an extremely regulated, extremely change-averse area of the economy where entrenched insiders will always close ranks to protect their own.

<comment><USER26> I wouldn't be so sure. My millionaire uncle built his fortune on medical software, and I have a friend who works in the field with a degree just for it (medical technologies).

<comment><USER27> I'd love to learn more about your uncle's story! Can you provide any additional details? What does the software do?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I see a huge trend coming in "DIY Medicine". Doctors, insurers, and the FDA are way too expensive for mere gatekeeping, and technology is developing new treatments and dropping equipment costs an order of magnitude faster than they can respond. For example, I can buy all of the equipment necessary for a PRP injection for less than the cost of a single treatment, and the doctor that does it knows no more about how to do it than any nurse that took a weekend course. There are also many simple drugs that aren't used because they either can't be patented or because the cost is too low. Many of these treatments obviate the need for much more expensive and dangerous treatments with questionable outcomes, like surgery and high-priced drugs. Doctors know that the price of the most effective treatments may not sustain their profession. So if we're not there already, it's coming to the point where the medical industry does more harm than good, and gray market treatments will give far better outcomes for an order magnitude lower cost.

<comment><USER29> "Doctors know that the price of the most effective treatments may not sustain their profession."

This is not really a fair assessment. The most cost effective treatments can be self administered. But if you are coming in to see me because of persistent knee pain, more often that not you have already tried tylenol and over the counter nsaids (ibuprofen, etc.), and your pain has been persistent. The next set of treatment options, aside from maybe some physical therapy, are more expensive, because they involve using drugs that are more expensive or treatment measures that are more expensive. With re: PRP, it is not covered by insurance, since the benefits of it over a placebo are still not entirely clear. Many doctors offer it however, and to insure accuracy of needle placement, they usually perform it under ultrasound guidance- not something most people would be able to do on their own, at least not yet. As more and more physicians offer it, and if it remains uncovered, market forces will drive the prices down (like Lasik), although I'm doubtful PRP is considered an effective treatment option in the future.

I don't disagree with the notion that healthcare remains quite expensive in general. I see telemedicine, for certain conditions, reducing costs and maybe Direct Primary Care - bundling care into one package instead of serving it piecemeal could be a good way to go forward.

<comment><USER28> I was including the price of the ultrasound imaging machine. And I'm not talking about Tylenol either, which is a harmful and oversubscribed drug anyway. Example: I've been given a choice: surgery that includes removal of hip cartilage, or nothing. But there are many natural growth factors that have shown excellent cartilage regeneration. PRP wouldn't be among my first choices, but as an example, it's better than nothing, better than surgery, and the FDA can't make my own blood illegal. The two surgeries I did get elsewhere were terrible and didn't really solve the problem. There are other cheap options for regenerative injections, and they are extremely common among elite and professional athletes. They are also used extensively by large animal vets, and it turns out that there's nothing I need that a race horse doesn't, but it's legal for him and not for me. Diagnostics also, a huge area for free market expansion. The cost of an MRI is dropping below the cost of a copay. And most of all, it's a question of value added by doctors, which is mostly informational, and as with all information commodities, rapidly dropping to zero. In my vision of the future, I decide what I want, and I pay for it. Simple.

<comment><USER30> Maybe see a better doctor. If you've self diagnosed and researched a treatment yourself, they should be understanding. However, without high evidence data or guidelines, you could sue them and they woruld have no leg to stand on, so I'm sure there's a component of defensive medicine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> One general theme I think is getting more and more apparent is the phenomenon of large systems breaking down.

One of the side effects of globalization and the internet is that it becomes more and more apparent over time when there are opportunities for asymmetric impact. And there will always be bad actors that look to take advantage of that.

This is partly because we as consumers get used to the abuses and start accepting them. Back in the 90s, the onset of email spam was something that caused a _lot_ of indignance and active outrage. Banner ads were a huge deal, too.

But a lot of it is just from the bad actors getting more sophisticated. Including state actors that are invested in causing the breakdown of democratic norms in other countries.

So I think there will continue to be opportunity in the decentralization realm. Tools for various forms of self-governance. That could mean publishing (activitypub), hosting (ipfs), or even actual governance (decision-making and voluntary policy compliance among groups).

<comment><USER32> A book to greatly add to your perspectives about large complex systems failing: _Inviting Disaster_

[https://www.amazon.com/Inviting-Disaster-Lessons-Edge- Techno...](https://www.amazon.com/Inviting-Disaster-Lessons-Edge- Technology/dp/0066620821)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I listened to Robert Green's talk at Google recently [0]

He proposes the following idea:

        - Everybody born within 22 years of each other belong to a "generation"

        - Generations follow a cycle:
           - There is a rebellious generation
           - The next generation is trying to keep the ideals of the rebellious generation alive
           - The third generation is very conservative
           - The fourth generation is a "crisis" generation that will eventually lead to a rebellion in the next generation and the cycle continues.

        - Millennials are the crisis generation today

It's a very interesting theory - and provides a new way to think about what comes next. Looking back, the last generation that appears to be a "rebellious" generation were the hippies centered around 1969. I can't think of any giants that started in that era. Instead, that era felt like it produced most of the core technologies that drove big economic changes in the next several decades.

History doesn't really repeat, but it sometimes rhymes with itself. If the next generation is rebellious - and they end up being like the last rebellious generation - we are looking at 22 years of deep technological developments that will lead to the next big things in two generations from now.

Honestly - this is just an interesting way to think about the world but I wouldn't act upon it. If I was forced to place a bet on who (not what) will make it big in the next 25 years, I'd put $5 (and not a cent more) on somebody who is doing a PhD today and will get to work on deep research for a few decades.

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcaVhMt71qE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcaVhMt71qE)

<comment><USER18> He was probably drawing from the Strauss-Howe generational theory[1], which is more than 20 years old now. He (or you) should have credited the original thinkers for these ideas. Their 1997 book "The Fourth Turning" is considered pseudoscience but nonetheless great food for thought, imho.

Note that the cycle may sometimes be shorter (3 gens) or longer (5). It's not really a theory, more like empirical observation. Unfortunately, it has no predictive power whatsoever, so it's just that, food for thought.

Edit: Interestingly, it came out almost at about the same time as Huttington's "Clash of the Civilizations"[2], and a number of interesting scenarios from Shell[3][4] and the CIA (link?), which notably informed Clinton's push for global democracy — all these studies concurred, at the time, that positive disruption was a plausible scenario.

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generatio...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generational_theory)

[2]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clash_of_Civilizations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clash_of_Civilizations)

[3]: [https://www.shell.com/energy-and-innovation/the-energy- futur...](https://www.shell.com/energy-and-innovation/the-energy- future/scenarios/new-lenses-on-the-future/earlier- scenarios/_jcr_content/par/expandablelist/expandablesection_225706646.stream/1519772477959/e19b5221f581ce9c5e5cee0069c7439720e81526/shell- global-scenarios19952020.pdf)

[4]: [https://www.shell.com/energy-and-innovation/the-energy- futur...](https://www.shell.com/energy-and-innovation/the-energy- future/scenarios/new-lenses-on-the-future/earlier- scenarios/_jcr_content/par/expandablelist/expandablesection_225706646.stream/1519772497153/2c501efef838a67595501d4acb83194f6c5da570/shell- global-scenarios19982020.pdf)

<comment><USER34> The idea of cycles in social history is as old as the hills. It's possible your claim that he drew from Strauss-Howe is correct, but while they may have packaged the idea in a distinctive way, it has a long history.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_cycle_theory](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_cycle_theory)

<comment><USER18> Oh indeed! Thanks for the precision, well worth noting.

The particular arrangement of The _Fourth_ Turning is adamantly specific though (and quite famous in sociological circles, iirc it's where our modern concepts of "millenials" or "gen X" etc. come from); it's hard to mistake it for anything else.

I don't doubt for one second that Greene knows it, or that he'd expect a sophisticated audience (such as Googlers) to know it too — the credit is probably very much implied as soon as you present things this way. Like we don't need to credit someone for E=mc² or a²+b²=c² because it's obvious. Green is notoriously awesome at doing synthesis of a bunch of seminal sources, that's his M.O. — more than original thinking imho, but his delivery is often incredibly worthy of interest.

Fwiw, I'd argue it's extremely easy to take pretty much any social dimension(s) and slap some abstract model on top of it with relevance. I've read countless such accounts, and did it myself in regard to cycles in concentration of political power. Strauss-Howe's model is relatively interesting insofar as it draws upon quite long-term history (some variations / extensions go back to ~1200 iirc, though the core theory was fundamentally applied to the American civilization), which gives it weight.

Source: I studied sociology-anthropology-politics.

<comment><USER34> Thanks I didn't realise the naming originated with them. wrt pseudo science the whole social cycles subject is interesting and _sometimes_ plausible enough to read about even if you take it with a large pinch of salt.

<comment><USER18> Yes, social cycles are definitely a thing empirically, historically. The learning curve over humanity's civilization is tedious, hard, but we're making progress overall. We have reached a situation where some actors, being super- massive, have enough data and tools to effectively move social behavior —a long movement from 'States' (whatever the name) since immemorial centuries up to big tech in the 21st.

I think the future of social sciences is there, currently tightly secured intellectual property and datasets in the beating core of giant tech. Those who command enough of that elusive 'power' are now capable of shaping humanity to an unprecedented degree.

Like any tool, _neither good nor bad but what we make of it..._

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I work in this field so I'm incredibly biased: automated business solutions that cut entry-level data employees out of the equation. You save TONS on the bottom line, and cut out human-driven process that is error prone and difficult to manage. I'm talking about things beyond "API-driven dev", more in the realms of Puppeteer, Microsoft Office automation, screen-scraping (mouse/keyboard), etc. I make API's out of things that other devs balk at - and trust me, it has a lot of market value.

This isn't as "up and coming" as all of the other items people are mentioning, but I'd put it on a "always increasing in popularity" trajectory due to an ever-increasing need. It's not really sexy or interesting, but there will always be a HUGE market for the things that I can do =)

I will warn people that "up and coming" tech is often fad-based and has boom and bust cycles, and personally I'd rather be working for a paycheck then waiting to win the lottery in this regard.

<comment><USER36> How do you find processes that can be automated? I've often thought that there must be a ton of this stuff in various industries where programmers aren't typically embedded.

<comment><USER37> Very common when you do tech work in a non-tech industry. Comes up a lot with coding-inclined mechanical engineers. Zed Shaw's words are really true:

> Programming as a profession is only moderately interesting. It can be a good > job, but you could make about the same money and be happier running a fast > food joint. You're much better off using code as your secret weapon in > another profession. People who can code in the world of technology companies > are a dime a dozen and get no respect. People who can code in biology, > medicine, government, sociology, physics, history, and mathematics are > respected and can do amazing things to advance those disciplines.

[https://learnpythonthehardway.org/python3/advice.html](https://learnpythonthehardway.org/python3/advice.html)

<comment><USER38> Same money running a fast food joint? You're underpaid bro or you know some crazy overpaid fast food managers. People from science based fields are coming to computer science because those other fields lack job opportunities at competitive pay.

<comment><USER39> McDonald's franchise owners make $500k to $1 million a year, in average. That's profit, not revenue.

My source is from the McDonald's franchise disclosure documents. The money blog mentioned in sibling comments claim it's less.

<comment><USER40> According to this random quora link: [https://www.quora.com/How-much-does- McDonalds-make-in-a-day](https://www.quora.com/How-much-does-McDonalds-make- in-a-day) the average McDonald's unit in the USA has $2,670,320 in annual sales. 25% - 40% profit margin sounds really high for a restaurant, but I don't know enough about the industry to dispute it. Are you sure those numbers were presented as averages and not the high end of what you could make? Or does the typical owner have multiple locations?

<comment><USER39> My source was this pdf: [https://www.bluemaumau.org/sites/default/files/MCD%202013%20...](https://www.bluemaumau.org/sites/default/files/MCD%202013%20FDD.pdf)

Very possible I skimmed and may have read it incorrectly, accounting is not my thing. As I have now reached the maximum amount of effort I'm willing to put into a forum comment, I'm not going to dig any further. But if you can tease out better information, I'd be curious to know.

<comment><USER41> From the document... Across ~12,000 locations they put the majority of restaurants in a range but they do have the numbers pretty well crunched.

Average profit margin 26-28% Average gross sales 2.2 - 2.6M Average operating income before rent/tax: 570k - <USER2>

"The rent paid to McDonald's will vary based upon sales and McDonald's investment in land, site improvements, and building costs."

It looks like that rent paid to McD's home planet is somewhere in the neighborhood of 10% of that investment (yearly? I guess?) but it seems to average about 100k-150k.

<comment><USER39> Good, this was my takeaway as well. My range was loosely rounded since 716k was something like the 85th percentile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Cooperatives. The economy needs to shift away from giant companies with pay ratios of a thousand to one between CEOs and average employees and employees need control over their workplace to move to the next stage of capitalism. Make it easier for collectives to start up businesses that aren't purely focused on profit and instead focused on employees taking ownership of their work.

It may not be the biggest profit possible, but I think that if you enable 22 small worker-owned cooperatives to exist more easily somehow that's a huge karmic return on investment.

Maybe said cooperatives are software companies that work together to do contract work. I think that there are a number of places that try to match up contractors with clients, and places like Gusto work great for employees but I don't think they can handle member distributions (the IRS's term for payments a company makes to an owner versus an employee).

I'm not sure what to do to help the most exactly, but I think this kind of company is going to be increasingly important in the future. Maybe even just like an online forum for people trying to start cooperatives to discuss their common issues.

<comment><USER31> I've always thought it would be interesting to figure out the smallest number of people needed to create a pop-up town or microtown. If you get a sufficient number of people together, plop them down anywhere, run water/electricity/sewer, and start a community. It might be that most of them would have to telecommute for revenue, but then you'd also have the local general store or whatever else you'd need. But the people there would be the community and social support network.

<comment><USER43> I'm also interested in this and have spent considerable time learning/practicing off-gridding. The key is finding good land in unincorporated areas with a permissive county code. There's a few good counties in California for this.

Some counties are more willing than others to grant variances for experimental communities.

It's feasible for the first time ever because of the opportunities for remote work, cheap PV, delivery of anything via amazon (yes, they'll deliver to places on dirt roads which is awesome - negates a need for a general store), etc. There's also an increased interest in being closer to nature and away from the city for a variety of health reasons apart from the considerable savings.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Quantum computing is becoming more viable for amateurs to experiment with. A few years ago, Microsoft released an SDK for quantum computing and you can run your solutions on a real quantum computer using Azure.

You'll learn a ton of linear algebra as a side-effect of working with quantum computing, which is the foundation of lots of other fields of computer science, like graphics and AI. I'm confident that the pool of quantum programmers is effectively zero, and I wouldn't be surprised if AI spills over into the field and causes an explosion of demand for quantum programmers. By 2024, it might be a field where you can write your own paycheck.

<comment><USER45> Microsoft does not allow one to run programs on real quantum computers. Only Rigetti Computing and IBM provide that service.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> I had the same question recently and so built an app to surface rapidly growing google trends.

It was a Show HN project not long ago and people seemed to like it: [https://trennd.co](https://trennd.co)

I've also noticed a lot of larger trends that other commenters have highlighted too:

\- data privacy focussed products (DuckDuckGo/SimpleAnalytics)

\- everything machine learning

\- meat substitutes

\- alternative forms of entertainment (axe throwing/escape rooms)

<comment><USER28> The prevalence of IT topics is surprising to me. I didn't think there were that many of us out there. Is there any bias of the results toward tech topics?

<comment><USER46> Yeah right now there is a tech bias since the scripts and sources on the backend are focussed more on that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I have a hunch that the Next Big Thing (TM) will be augmented reality: though the technology is currently in its infancy, when compelling AR glasses are finally released (Apple is rumored to be released theirs in 2020) I think that it will have a massive impact.

AR frameworks are a dime a dozen, but if you're an Apple person look into ARKit + Swift.

<comment><USER48> One of the big wildcards for widespread consumer use is the social aspect. We can envision what AR might look like in everyday life. What's far less clear to me is the degree to which people will accept AR glasses that are constantly using video and audio to deliver information to the wearer will be accepted. If I know that person I just met has inconspicuously scanned me and looked up all kinds of information that are now being displayed, am I OK with that?

<comment><USER49> I think AR almost has to be Apple, not from a tech perspective, but from "this tech is very creepy, invasive, and visibly so" angle. Apple may be the only company that is simultaneously big enough to make the tech happen and charismatic enough to get us to let down our guard to it. Although that latter one is rapidly diminishing.

<comment><USER48> That's an interesting angle. Though I'm not sure to what degree the average consumer draws this distinction between Apple and Google.

Apple also probably just has about as much brand permission as anyone to create a new category of consumer device and shepherd it through the first couple of versions that will doubtless have shortcomings.

<comment><USER49> When I say charisma I mean literally being charming, like Google didn't have the tact to role out glass, because glass _looked_ creepy. Apple would have had the tact to know not to. Furthermore I think we're looking at the first couple of pseudo-generations of of Apple AR glasses in the form of the latest iPhones and Apple Watches. Watches are testing the hardware that will be colocated with the UI and the A13 the overpowered chip responsible for doing the more powerful CV functions in like the users pocket.

<comment><USER48> Yes, I suspect we'll see AR on phones/watches well before we'll see it in glasses and associated wearables. There are some AR-ish apps today but they're very limited.

There are a lot of challenges to get glasses right--both from a hardware and a usability/acceptability perspective. But people are already used to using their phones for things so it seems a very natural transition.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> To borrow a term from Microsoft, "Intelligent Edge." With the shift to the cloud, we are finding there are still many scenarios that should start local for latency, bandwidth, or legal considerations. Organizations still want those scenarios to be easy to manage though.

An example might be in store retail analytics- a set up with a bunch of cameras that can detect what people are touching or otherwise interested in. It makes little sense to ship the video streams all the way back to a cloud provider, but orgs want the capability all the same.

<comment><USER51> >An example might be in store retail analytics- a set up with a bunch of cameras that can detect what people are touching or otherwise interested in.

Because the one thing desperately needed in this world is even more surveillance?

<comment><USER50> Most retail stores have been heavily surveilled for a long time by cctv for shoplifting purposes.

One, perhaps naive, hope I have for edge based technologies is to enable scenarios that are actually more private. In my scenario, if the processing of the video stays at the edge and only anonymized or aggregated information is sent up to the cloud/ larger organization, then is much better then if the video is shipped offsite and processed.

It'll take some interesting legislative efforts to really frame this well, but the Europeans (and the state or Illinois with their facial recognition law?) at least seem to be headed that way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Platforms that enable a diaspora of small businesses to operate as effectively as large organizations with minimal startup cost.

Why build a massive services organization when you can enable and finance a takeover by a multitude of smaller players?

<comment><USER53> This is interesting. Do you have any examples in mind that achieve this? Whether in particular niches or solving common problems throughout small business?

<comment><USER52> I believe Quicken is behind the recent resurgence of independent mortgage lenders, which was a market all but captured by traditional banks until recently.

Services like Rover seem to be displacing kennels for doggy daycare. They should consider micro-loans to their highest rated dog watchers for things like fences if they have not already.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Tools that make development 10x easier for the next generation of programmers. There's many different ways to approach this and there are going to be a number of very successful startups in this space IMHO. Examples: darklang.com, webflow.com, retool.com, modulz.com, divjoy.com (disclaimer: my project).

<comment><USER55> This applies to everything. The idea is that the talent pool for a given job will increase, as jobs become easier and easier. Especially AI will drive down the needed expertise for a given job. E.g. nurses will increasingly be able to do jobs that require doctors today.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> The climate emergency has pushed me hard into quite a few areas that have a lot of promise for huge impact, to name a few:

\- electromobility: concerting bikes, kick-scooters, cars ... this all is much easier than it seems, also has a vibrant open source culture

\- demand response in electricity grids has quite a few startups (one of which I just joined) that help integrating a lot of renewables in a way that does not break grid stability

\- passivhaus buildings that can save 90% of heating/cooling for 10% extra cost in construction

\- storing carbon into buildings with wood/CLT

\- plating trees, reforesting deserts etc

\- if you really want to go long there are a few fields of microbiology that could reduce our pollution from agriculture a lot

<comment><USER57> I studied sustainability related topics for my Bachelor's and Master's degrees, but transitioned to full-time software development. Now I've promised myself I'll try to work exclusively for companies doing something climate positive. I must admit the intersection of sustainability and TypeScript is more narrow than I'd like! Let me know which companies you find.

There are some great, mission driven urban and smart-city related companies-- Swiftly, Sidewalk Labs, Remix. The whole mobility SaaS scene like Ioki (my employer), Via, door2door. Some cool unique projects like Doconomy.

But unfortunately for me the most impactful companies will have a much more specific niche than just "sustainability", and often are more in science and engineering than software. Like the ones you've pointed out, or lab grown meat and meat substitutes, renewable energy, geospatial tech, manufacturing, etc.

So I try take this extra motivation and energy and throw it at side projects: getting [https://offsetra.com](https://offsetra.com) off the ground, and trying to find people to use my mapping tool for citizen science and civic engagement [https://canvis.app](https://canvis.app)

While there isn't a lot to be optimistic about in the grand sense, we can at least feel a bit optimistic in the career sense-- sustainability and climate are more hot than ever these days (no pun intended).

<comment><USER58> Drones which plant trees seem pretty exciting:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkNdrTZ7CG4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkNdrTZ7CG4)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Climate change will create the first trillionaire.

Find everything that eats fossil fuels and electrify it. Find everything that requires stable land and predictable weather and put it in a shipping container. Find every infrastructure investment that requires decades to pay off and decentralize it.

Instead of water line pipes, pull water out of the air. Instead of copper and fiber optic cables on telephone poles, use solar and satellites. Instead of refrigerated transportation, grow food in your pocket or your stomach. Instead of roads, take to the air.

We won't fix the climate out of kindness. Warren Buffet invested $$ Billions into wind farms because it makes his wallet feel better. Tim Cook just yesterday gave a speech that Apple said "We don't see climate change as risk, but opportunity", that's straight from the world's first trillion dollar company. [1] Elon Musk announced that SpaceX Starship will be pulling its fuel out of atmospheric carbon dioxide on Earth, and on Mars [2]

We'll need to completely reinvent society. Sustainable transportation, vertical agriculture, solar/wind/nuclear energy, air mining, an all-electric economy.

Topics: Direct Air Capture, making products out of atmospheric carbon dioxide, carbon removal. Check out all the companies in the space here: [http://airminers.org](http://airminers.org)

[1] [https://www.macrumors.com/2019/10/22/tim-cook-talks- sustaina...](https://www.macrumors.com/2019/10/22/tim-cook-talks- sustainability-ceres-gala-nyc/)

[2] [https://youtu.be/sOpMrVnjYeY?t=3850](https://youtu.be/sOpMrVnjYeY?t=3850)

<comment><USER60> One thing I've never been able to figure out is that given Crispr, why it wouldn't be possible to engineer an organism that can suck much more CO2 out of the air than any existing tree / algae could. Even more ideal if we can make a good building material out of the engineered plant to sequester Carbon.

It's easy to see how the manual selection process would work here - plant a bunch of trees, see how much O2 each produces and pick Top N and repeat. Of course, this needs thousands of years to run manually because the improvement with each generation would be minimal.

Is the issue that we don't know what gene(s) control photo-synthesis?

<comment><USER61> This is being worked on. The problem is we are terrible at engineering biosystems, CRISPR currently works mainly to knockout genes rather than the kind of enhanced evolution you describe, and upscaling a solution to the point it can have a planetary impact is non-trivial.

<comment><USER60> Re: upscaling, I was reading another article on HN about a specific species of plant when grown in sufficiently large quantities (6x size of Texas I think) would basically bring us down to carbon neutral. We can probably scrounge up that land if the world works together but who knows.

Re: engineering biosystems, I imagine engineering native plants (if possible) has much fewer ecosystem wide chain effects) than using gene drives to eliminate mosquitoes or whatever.

Re: crispr, I see photos of glow in the dark monkeys and super muscular dogs, so as a layman it seems like cutting a gene and vaguely throwing the desired gene near the cut location seems to work. We don't have as many ethical implications about rapidly iterating on plants as we do on animals, so it seems like if an experiment doesn't work, just repeat 1000x until it works would do it. People talk about off-target effects etc. but you won't really know unless you try I guess.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> Communications technology has moved past the ability of human brains to tolerate and mitigate the adverse effects.

Every addicting dopamine surge from a Like or Retweet is the evidence; every viral pile-on, every echo-chamber lunatic fringe.

Making humanity resilient to the negative externalities of our own technological advancement is essential for the survival of our species. Right now, a vast army of the smartest people are employed at the intersection of cognitive and computer sciences, but in the service of political and commercial interests. I'd like to see more of them on the other side of this arms race, working on our individual and societal defenses.

<comment><USER18> I don't think it's the best way to make money, but this may be _the most important topic for our near future as a species_. Emphasis: not just civilization(s) but _species_ as a whole, as in rewiring perception, brain functions, social life, freedom of thought.

Here's my conundrum: we _could_ design a transparent and 100% user-controlled communication network — basically some open-sourced Twitter / Facebook / Whatsapp / Instagram etc. — which would let people control their feed order of priorities, implement 'psychologically sane' features, prove that it's objectively better for mental health and a slew of other things (politics, media come to mind) through studies, even distribute resources so as to bypass a need for massive funding — just consider how much time the average consumer CPU spends idling over its lifetime, there's _loads_ of free resources available.

But ultimately we face the same issue as for-profits: friction. How do we get 2.5 billion people to move when none has moved already — chicken-and-the-egg problem of "but all my friends..."

I may be low-balling humanity but I think it'll take PR momentum, textbook buzz — support by famous people, icons, thought leaders, influencers, etc at a massive scale. Ideally governments would be on board and even subsidize such a neutral network in the name of protecting citizens and their rights.

Is it challenging, herculean, foolish, or simply impossible an endeavor? Wish I knew. But I'll sure die trying —hopefully of other unrelated causes, eh.

<comment><USER63> Think you nailed it - the most important problem is overcoming the social friction that enables companies to centralize control of entire industries for no reason other than - they got to it first. We need ways for consumers to organize en-masse to switch services - since trickling out one by one has such a disadvantage ("all my friends use X...").

My hope there, if any, lies in someone developing a mature incentivization system to get people to commit to leaving en-masse. If you just have to click a single button that says "I'll leave Facebook if 50% of my friends do", then that's super low effort - and as soon as those commitments trickle up to a big enough number, the software can organize the move en-masse. Problem is, nobody needs to _actually_ commit to that, so there might need to be additional layers of carrot/sticks.. but that's doable too! You could e.g. commit $20 to your decision, and the software could automatically track whether you followed through (e.g. leaving Facebook for Freebook). Likewise, many of these migrations ("mutinies"?) could be _very_ lucrative for the receiving party - so much so that they might be happy to pay people that $20 to move, just to guarantee future business. (and presumably Freebook would be a little less evil than Facebook). The problem today is just that anyone who hates these services has to make _so_ much effort to do anything useful about it that it's just never going to happen. We require mass-organization tools. (These are also, coincidentally, the exact same tools needed for effective Unionization, so - speculate however you want on why they don't exist yet).

Additional comment, for what it's worth: the underlying system of contracts that implements the above is a very strong use case for blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies. The amount of power and flexibility you get at dealing with all the complex financial incentives of the above could really come in handy - especially when you consider that such organizations will probably also need some kind of internet governance to decide what to do (which decentralized software is key for). With crypto, it's forseeable you could even do some crazy things like tie the incentives for each user to a (e.g. Facebook) stock-shorting contract - effectively making a profit off of tearing down one company and moving to the next... self-financing the whole movement.

And that to me then begs a whole other realm of speculation, because if this kind of organizational technology became widespread and actually used by people - shit... the entire relationship of consumer and producer gets flipped over. Any company that's making profit, unless it has some _completely unique_ quality that can't be repeated by another startup company, could just be attacked by this mob of consumers - transferring all business to the new company en-masse, giving them even less profit. I guess in theory that's kinda how it works already, but this really could up the carnage to levels we've never seen before - and takes away that inherent platform advantage that so many companies are leaning on.

In summary though: yeah, seems the biggest problem is platform centralization. Moving from that requires high-quality decentralized platforms, and organizational tools that can incentivize and plan such big en-masse movements. I believe the tech to do that is fresh, still being worked on, but is coming - and it could have some pretty cool implications for how the world works if it does.

<comment><USER64> > centralize control of entire industries for no reason other than - they got > to it first.

But those big companies didn't get there first.

History is littered with companies that were too big to beat. The secret is obvious but difficult: find a better way and people that agree it's a better way. Look at Cirrus Aircraft for a relatively recent example — they tackled an ultra regulated, expensive business and are now the best selling GA airplane

<comment><USER65> Exactly, we need a Facebook that actually encourages healthy human interaction and is adverse to viral pollution, dopamine addiction and rage triggers. If it's genuinely useful it will win out.

<comment><USER18> That is exactly my view too. You win by being _better_ than whatever else exists at the time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> I live without a car. I have for more than a decade.

Trying to plan car-free travel routes in the US is a huge pain in the butt. If Google maps can't spit out a solution that gets you all the way to your destination, it won't tell you a partial answer.

This means piecing together information from multiple sources. I spent a lot of time checking Amtrak routes and then looking for commuter bus routes, local shuttle services and the like to find a viable route.

In the past few days, I've done some googling to try to see if there is a website that handily aggregates commuter bus route info. There doesn't seem to be such.

In Southern California, you can travel from San Diego to Victorville via commuter bus, but there is no travel site that will tell you that. You have to research all the connections yourself.

(Well, I had to. I posted it to my homeless site: [https://sandiegohomelesssurvivalguide.blogspot.com/2015/05/o...](https://sandiegohomelesssurvivalguide.blogspot.com/2015/05/oceanside- to-victorville-for-1525-in.html))

I have to wonder how many other places in the US actually have similar situations where you can get there via bus or other transit, assuming you can dig up the information.

Living without a car is an environmentally-friendly choice and it's hugely painful in the US, often very unnecessarily so. Serving this need could promote not only environmental goals but also serve social justice because car-free Americans are frequently poor. We make it so painful to live without a car in the US that most Americans who can afford a car have one, even if they don't really want one, with the exception of a few dense metro areas with good local transit (like New York).

<comment><USER67> Definitely take a look at Rome2Rio, [https://www.rome2rio.com](https://www.rome2rio.com). We've been using it for years, and have been carless nearly as long.

<comment><USER66> Thanks. I'll check it out sometime.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> Information quality, the nascent field of labeling content with metadata about its veracity. Its dense with hard problems, but a good solution that gains majority consensus is critical for the future of digital communication. Facebook or any private entity ought not be the canonical fact-checker of the 21st century. Ideally IMHO is it delivered as an open protocol.

</comment><comment><USER69> I forecast that plastics' cleanup and recycling, a hard problem, will have a lot of money thrown at it by governments. Many new petrochemical plants are being built in anticipation of increased demand for plastics from developing countries. So it seems that the already-large problem of plastics waste, including microplastics, will continue to grow to the point of being overwhelming. In particular, we are poisoning our oceans with discarded plastics, choking sea creatures such as turtles which mistake clear plastic bags for jellyfish their main food. And, perhaps most insidious, we are introducing microplastics into our oceans' food chains with consequences unknown. I fear that this "waste product" will grow to be as damaging as that other industrial waste, carbon dioxide. What's the solution?

</comment><comment><USER70> I think AR has potential to be the most impactful new type of technology, but I don't have any idea if wide adoption is 1 year away, or 10 years away (or more).

At the moment most of the focus is around overlaying some virtual world in the real world, but I think that technologies like U1 chip being added to new Apple devices could be really interesting to allow objects in the physical world to better mesh with digital world.

Experimenting with live filters for Instagram could be an easy way to dip your toes into AR: [https://sparkar.facebook.com/ar- studio/](https://sparkar.facebook.com/ar-studio/)

<comment><USER71> It's a fun tech, but I fail to see any real world value that can be derived from it. I have worked on AR stuff before and found some niche uses, but I am having real trouble finding general commercial applications apart from fun and games.

<comment><USER72> There are tons of applications! The thesis behind AR is that your phone (or some other device) can be a passport to accessing a digital world around you. Some ideas, in no particular order:

* Tourism of any kind (think AR museum or city tours)

* Location and event discovery -- as of late there have been quite a few startups trying to capitalize on giving people things to _do_ , but none successful. This is definitely on Snap's radar with their acquisition of Vurb[1] and Placed[2]

* Interactive public art -- Paris has something like this[3] and I really want to see these types of ARGs spread to other cities

* E-commerce -- superimposing clothing or furniture[4] onto the real world

Also, why are fun and games not valid applications? Epic Games, for example, is worth 4.5bn. Interactive media is finally being recognized by the mainstream, and it's just getting started :)

[1] [https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/vurb](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/vurb) [2] [https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/placed](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/placed) [3] [https://apps.apple.com/us/app/flashinvaders/id895180919](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/flashinvaders/id895180919) [4] [https://www.amazon.com/adlp/arview](https://www.amazon.com/adlp/arview)

<comment><USER73> Yep, for tourism. Look at some of the examples this small company is/has worked on: gamifi.co

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> Differential Dataflow is going to cause a huge upset in several high value areas, including incremental compilation, database view maintenance, UI view maintenance (subsumes React), and differential database streaming: [https://github.com/TimelyDataflow/differential- dataflow](https://github.com/TimelyDataflow/differential-dataflow)

<comment><USER75> What's the main difference between this and event sourcing?

<comment><USER76> Not the OP, but as I understand this project, the idea is that you can represent a pipeline that looks like it's operating on an entire collection of data, but in reality can operate on a delta.

That means that if you have a million items in your input, and you add another million to it, your pipeline only needs to run on one million, even though the output will be two million. In this case, the input is a collection that may be modified at any point, not a linear sequence of "events".

I've designed a similar system to ingest data that comes in the form of snapshots. The pipeline has many discrete steps and starts by splitting up the snapshot (e.g. a big monolithic JSON file) into smaller parts, which gets parses, transformed, split, joined etc. When a modified file comes in, the pipeline only performs actions on modified items; as data trickles through the pipeline, subsequent steps only run if a step modifies an item (relative to current state). It significantly reduces processing.

Pachyderm works on a similar principle, but using files in a virtual file system.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER77> Offline First web and mobile app frameworks. Not as big as social/mobile/local, but a need. Building offlinefirst web/mobile sites/apps is still a big hack.

[http://offlinefirst.org/](http://offlinefirst.org/)

A few years ago there was a lot of activity around creating web frameworks that made rich UI's possible, like Cappucino, Meteor.js etc.

There may be a similar opportunity now to create a full-featured, polished offline-first framework, and then make an enterprise version and/or get acqui- hired.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cappuccino_(Application_Develo...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cappuccino_\(Application_Development_Framework\))

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteor_(web_framework)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteor_\(web_framework\))

</comment><comment><USER78> As to your question of promising areas, I see two major opportunities in health that are coming online in the near future:

* psychedelics as medicine

* gut/microbiome

<comment><USER79> seconding both of these.

psychedelics as medicine are finally starting to gain the traction and serious research which they will need to be utilized therapeutically. while imperfect, they're potentially curative therapies which are likely a quantum leap ahead of much of what psychopharmacology has had in its roster so far.

the gut/microbiome stuff is also starting to come to a head after about 9 years of intense research activity. clinical applications are right around the corner, and there's an entire universe to explore which we've only scratched the surface of so far.

i'd also like to add cannabinoid (CBD) therapeutics as an addendum to psychedelic medicines. while there's a tremendous amount of hype and folk science surrounding CBD, it appears as though the chemical does in fact have a massive impact in domains ranging from immunology to psychiatry to geriatrics. we're just at the very start of the research process, and there are already a cornucopia of compelling and empirically valid leads which need to be followed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER80> Usable cryptography.

iPhone-level UX for private key management.

People care about privacy, and more are willing to pay for it. There is a massive opportunity for direct monetization through cryptocurrency users, and the things you could build when this problem is solved...

<comment><USER81> As someone who uses cryptography daily (and not for crypto currency), I would kill for that.

The problem is that it's really hard to build good abstractions. You can't get the math to do things that the math doesn't do, so the complexity comes from (1) preventing people from mathematically shooting themselves in the foot, and (2) twisting the math into something that approximates real world problems.

We all want to be able to say "here is cryptographic magic that tells you that this data is trustworthy", but trust is fundamentally a human problem. Cryptography ultimately allows humans to make and move around declarations of fact, but how you glue those facts together is messy because humans are kind of bad at saying what they mean and meaning what they say.

</comment></comment><comment><USER82> Lonliness, particularly among the elderly.

<comment><USER83> Dogs, man's best friend.

<comment><USER84> Gets harder as you get more elderly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER83> I'm hoping Dynamic Relational will catch on. Unlike the dynamic NoSql products, this is pro-SQL so you don't have to relearn much. You get dynamism AND familiarity (per existing RDBMS experience). I believe the industry wants it, they just don't know it yet, expecting a rigid dichotomy between either "stiff" RDBMS's -or- NoSql.

[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/66385/dynamic- database-s...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/66385/dynamic-database- schema#46202802)

</comment><comment><USER19> Memristors. Thus far, they have not been used very well, mostly due to 'lock in' effects. But their power savings are fairly intense (as compared to current solutions, about a factor of ~10^3 - 10^4). With AI and ML stuff literally heating up, those power savings will become more and more attractive. Eventually, a sea change will occur and memristive based computing will become the dominant one. Personally, I think that the synapse-like characteristics of memristors aren't as fully exploited as they should be and new chip designs will greatly aide the transition to better and better AIs and ML devices on less power and smaller form factors. Think the modern image classification on a Tesla but powered by a watch battery, for months.

<comment><USER85> The wikipedia page seems to imply we still dont know if any memristors physically exist. Your comment implies it's in experimentation, so I am assuming wiki is out of date

I would love to learn more about this topic, do you have any additional information / sources?

<comment><USER19> The Talk page on the wiki has some activity from this year, so it may be up to date - ish. There are a few companies that are selling memristors [1], but, as you say, they may not be fully truthful in describing their products. I'd take a look at some of the texts that are for sale [2] to dive deeper, provided you already know a fair bit of EE. If you do not, pick up this book [3] to get a good education. I may not be the best resource on this though. I'd email Dr. Chua directly and just ask him [4] for some resources, or just go through his publications list on it [5]. If you do email him, try for breaks in semesters, as Profs tend to be less busy then. Also, he has had 25 PhD students, so you can reach out to them as well.

[1] [https://knowm.org/product/](https://knowm.org/product/)

[2] [https://www.amazon.com/memristor/s?k=memristor](https://www.amazon.com/memristor/s?k=memristor)

[3] [https://www.amazon.com/s?k=the+art+of+electronics&crid=T6LE1...](https://www.amazon.com/s?k=the+art+of+electronics&crid=T6LE1KKXENK8&sprefix=the+art+of+ele%2Caps%2C177&ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_14)

[4] firstname.lastname@example.com

[5] [https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~chua/circuitrefs.html](https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~chua/circuitrefs.html)

<comment><USER85> Amazing reply. Thank you. I see Dr Chua is dropping a new text in December. I'll see what I can learn by then and if it sticks I'll support with a purchase

<comment><USER86> Don't bother. I work at a lab where some of the largest and best memristor based crossbars have been developed, and I can tell you it's almost all hype at this point. There are significant problems with memristive circuits, and very little advantage over something a lot more mature such as NOR flash crossbars (we work on both). There are many competing device technologies to use for analog computation, it's far from clear which one is better.

<comment><USER85> Ah bummer! I'll just keep an eye on it then. Anolog computation is where my interest is. I have a personal project where I have a subproblem of trying to use analog hardware to create a digital "impression" for processing. Terrible description, sorry

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER87> Residential PV installs are becoming more and more common so consumers are looking for smart devices to take advantage of them more efficiently. If you are grid-tied without a battery (batteries like the Powerwall take much longer than a PV install to pay back, so the payback time is often greater than the warranty period) you want to use the energy at peak generation rather than selling it to the grid (which typically pays less than you pay to buy it).

There are a few devices to do this. In the UK the MyEnergi range is quite popular. They have devices to divert excess power to an electric vehicle and a electric hot water heater. However the data you can get out of them is limited - there are frequent complaints by YouTubers about this - and they require the cloud to get anything useful. Plus a full set is over £1000 - for what is effectively a CT clamp, relay and a nRF chip.

On a similar note it's impossible to control appliances like washing machines and dish washers to run during peak generation (unless you solder some wires to the control board), so they have to be started manually or set on a timer. Timers worked fine to take advantage of off-peak electricity tarrifs, but for PV they don't really work (maybe there is a cloud in the middle of the day). Ideally you want the device to know how much power is needed for each stage of the program, and pause if the available power is less than that.

<comment><USER88> SPI 2019 Day Zero Interview with Raghu Belur of Enphase Energy

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glSXghzDZcs&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glSXghzDZcs&feature=youtu.be&t=105)

</comment></comment><comment><USER89> You may find this useful: [https://80000hours.org/key- ideas/](https://80000hours.org/key-ideas/)

> At 80,000 Hours, we do research into how people can most effectively use > their careers to help solve the world's most pressing problems.

It seems their two top priority areas that attend to a "huge, neglected, and solvable" filter are:

\- Positively shaping the development of artificial intelligence

\- Biorisk reduction

</comment><comment><USER90> Most relevant: [https://80000hours.org](https://80000hours.org)

 _80,000 Hours_ is roughly how many hours a typical person will spend working. It's an organization that answers this question: How can you best use them to help solve the world's most pressing problems?

</comment><comment><USER91> In software, I am hopeful for applications of homomorphic encryption. It could solve some privacy issues preventing some classes of software from moving to the Cloud. There have been huge efficiency improvements over the last 10 years, there needs to be even more, probably hardware-assisted.

In general, climate change is the topic of the century, and with it energy generation and storage. I think intermittent renewables (wind and solar) are overvalued today. Nuclear fission has a large role to play (with SMRs for instance), hydrogen as well. Of course if we make fusion work all bets are off.

</comment><comment><USER92> A lot of folks are look forward to what's coming in tech, which is fine and good and can lead to promising careers and innovation. But I'm even more impressed with folks like Nintendo who do the exact opposite. They look at all the junk we've already passed up to see what can be done with it. So many times along their path they came up with products using what the Sony's would have considered obsolete junk. This is a great book about that history: [https://www.amazon.com/Super-Mario-Nintendo-Conquered- Americ...](https://www.amazon.com/Super-Mario-Nintendo-Conquered-America- ebook/dp/B004IYJEWE/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1571846082&sr=8-1)

I mention it because I think there's a lot of value looking at the "no longer promising" areas and see what can still be done with those tools and pieces in innovative ways. And so few are actually doing that.

<comment><USER93> This what Roku did as well - built tech out chips nobody even wanted to sell.

<comment><USER92> Oh wow, thanks for the reference. Any good histories of Roku out there you recommend?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER94> You need to take a longer term view if you want to notice things before they become trends. Hopping on the bandwagon once it's a "hot" or "promising" area is too late.

</comment><comment><USER95> Democratising manufacturing.

CAD / CAM is still hard. CAM especially. You have to know a great deal about materials and tools, even order of operations to help the computer build efficient tool paths. There is a lot of scope for process improvement and there are commercial opportunities to sell to job shops who would like have their engineers working more on CAD and less on CAM.

There is also potential here to make it so easy and affordable that having a 5 axis machine on your property is as common place as having a laser printer. 3D printing offers the ability to create more plastic crap you don't want, or prototype things you want made on a CNC in the future. 5 Axis CNC in the home means that you could download a mocha pot, wait a day (instead of shipping) then screw it together. Drones, motors (winding is still hard), car parts could either be downloaded or you take a video on your phone and let AI figure out the CAD / CAM.

<comment><USER96> this will never happen.

your example isn't very good. you still have to ship the raw materials and -- much worse -- deal with unit volumes of waste.

<comment><USER22> Uhh.... I've heard the "this can never happen" before.

5 and 6 DoF is tough, but there's tons of improvement everywhere in this realm. And we're talking of major improvement.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER97> There is an organisation 80000hours.org devoted to discovering careers related to future high-impact areas, it has a list of perspective career paths and reviews on them, including the obvious ones, like Machine Learning PhD, and not so obvious, like China specialist.

[https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/](https://80000hours.org/career- reviews/)

</comment><comment><USER98> > What's an area that people think is up and coming? I'm pretty introverted!

Spend 3 to 6 months on theatre acting and you will never need asking the cold internet again for anything personal!

<comment><USER99> Bingo! Correct answer. Anyone can learn to 'act' ... I got into teaching to help myself be more confident infront of adults. It turns out that groups of strangers are perfectly normal people, and there isn't anything to worry about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER100> tools for micro-entrepreneurs: with the growth of automation (e.g. RPA and AI) and the consequent decline of the world middle class, many people are being forced to work informally as a food deliverer or be an uber driver. others will become micro-entrepreneurs (solo-entrepreneurs for many). the opportunity is that these entrepreneurs will need all kinds of specialized tools during their journey (payment, marketing, finance, distribution, etc.)

<comment><USER101> In calling these people entrepreneurs you are really contorting the language. The entrepreneurs in this system are the creators and owners of the system. The other people are something else entirely.

<comment><USER100> i do not disagree regarding how we will call these "entrepreneurs". but problems looking for solutions for these people will be there (is already). it might even a chance to improve their lives

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER102> Blockchain Gaming: I only saw one other crypto/blockchain comment and I suspect people are avoiding the topic because of the amount of noise from the scene compared to a lack of real world applications. It's that lack of real applications that speaks (for me) about how far out we are from feeling the real impact of any blockchain related solution. However, like so many other technologies, right now is a great time to explore, learn, and evolve the technology through gaming. My gut feeling is that blockchain gaming will do well over the next 3 to 5 years.

<comment><USER103> Gambling was a big deal when currencies like ethereum came out but the inability for true randomness, without an external oracle, really killed it. IMO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER104> Machine Learning is the hot thing right now. Just find an area you like, and apply it. Not sure what is after this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I've had it on my list of stuff to look into for a while. Any advice on where to start?

<comment><USER105> A well honed skill set in 'ML' isn't even about the algorithms or data structures or any of that. If you want to be competitive in ML, study and think about experimental design, and what it takes to be able to confidently state the accuracy, precision, and reproducibility of a given analysis when you apply it to real world data.

The biggest issue/ liability with most 'AI'/'ML' is unsubstantiated/ irreproducible results that come from not being rigorous with ones experimental design.

<comment><USER106> How do you go about developing skill in experimental design?

<comment><USER105> I think the first step is to develop a skeptics mindset. As a scientist, your job isn't to believe, its to address evidence and evaluate whether or to it supports or conflicts with a given hypothesis. A profound influence on my development in the sciences was a older (he was 55+ at the time), physical chemist I shared an office with,'John'. Arguably, he was one of the greatest critical thinkers I had ever had the privilege of working with. Many other people at that office would avoid him entirely when discussing their work because if John heard about what they were doing, he would always 'challenge' (politely and professionally) them on what they were doing: how they had decided to set up their experiment; how they had decided to sample; how they intended to analyse their data; how they (physically and literally) planned on getting their data.

John did this because on his own work, he was constantly challenging his own assumptions. The result of this was that John 'appeared' to be far less productive; however, the results of his work were orders of magnitude more robust than our other colleagues at that time.

By incorporating a skeptics mindset, less becomes much more. A skeptic doesn't believe the internal error rates produced as a result of a model run, they take a long time to become convinced that a 'thing' is the truth. Don't believe, measure.

<comment><USER106> How does this apply to ML, beyond the usual train/validation/test split?

<comment><USER105> Because, the usual train/ validation/ test design often fails to generate a useful ML model/ pipeline. With out some serious consideration into the nitty gritty of the 'experiment design' (see above for what I mean by that), we get 'all-hat no cattle' results.

Lets take a small toy example from one that came up a few days ago, the model that could predict 'heart-disease' from one heartbeat. Their data set came from two different sources: their 'disease state' and 'null state' patients had their cardiograms recorded via different instruments. They did some statistical re-sampling to get the data to 'match', so, a skeptics flags should already be raised. Second major issue: without resampling, they had an effective N of 30; they made the decision to 'slice' every ones cardio gram into thousands of examples. The RNN (i think it was an RNN), obviously, will need thousands of examples to train. They then randomly sampled (according to their train/validation/test split) from this distribution of 'beats' to train their model.

So they didn't do anything 'wrong' according to what myself, and what I would assume yourself were told when we did this or that course in ML. But actually, from an experimental design POV, this is clearly going to overfit. Even disregarding the resampling of the original data (its own, very suspect issue), the slicing alone is enough to realize 'Ah. This is horse crap'. Think about it like this. Say its a 80:10:10 split. Take a random sample of n heartbeats, 3 heartbeats long, from n=100k heartbeats. What is the probability of a heartbeat in the training data set not being very close (in time proximity) to a heartbeat in the validation/ test set? I don't have the time to work it out on paper, but its most likely that anything in the test/ validation set will be temporally adjacent to something in the training set. The probability of anything in the test/ validation being very different from something in the training dataset (say, 3-4 beat sets away in either direction) is very very unlikely. The vast majority of data in the test/validation dataset will have two direct neighbors, both used in training, the next most populated class will have 1 neighbor in one direction, and the almost none will be separated at great distance (even 2-3 beats isolated from something in the training dataset).

This issue central here is the lack of independence in the experimental design. They've created quasi-independence in their sampling methodology, but at the end of the day, they've still only got an n of 30 (not 300,000-3,000,0000). I get it. For most cases, one _almost always_ has to create a condition of quasi-independence in ones data. To get these algorithms to work, you need lots of data.

Knowledge of what ML is, how it works under the hood (a bit), and how to implement it (more imp. imo), all matter in this space. What matters more (imo), is the mindset that can be developed by doing science as an intellectual exercise. Its good science to remain skeptical and be adherent to the evidence rather than our assumptions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm working on starting my own business with SDRs, radio, and the final area of hacking.

SigInt.

How do you protect yourself and your company from the myriad of radios and devices and BYOD policies? Can you keep up with what's talking over radio? Do you know what's secure and what's not? Do you want to not only find bad devices, but locate them in your facility?

Do you also want to detect radio attacks that originate in or out of your facility? Or, do drones disturb you?

That's what I'm working on.

<comment><USER107> sounds like some pretty interesting stuff!

</comment></comment><comment><USER108> Govtech and defense tech

Super high barriers to entry, governments are spending more and more but people are demanding better more efficient services and won't put up with waiting in line at the DMV forever. In defense, it's hard to see the applications and what to build from an outside view, hard to get contracts and permissions, and hard to compete with established co's like Boeing that have all of the relationships already.

<comment><USER109> Check out the SBIR program. It provides an easy way to get into the system and innovate.

<comment><USER110> Absolutely one of the best ways to get into the system.

<comment><USER111> Can you comment more about this? Curious about how people get into it. Applying for a grant?

<comment><USER110> [https://www.sbir.gov/solicitation- listing/open](https://www.sbir.gov/solicitation-listing/open)

This is a list of the current solicitations available. You can navigate around to the different departments. They have a calendar of announcements and due dates.

If you click on the DoD SBIR[0] it brings up the available topics. Each period has different areas of interest. You create a little proposal and then they announce "Phase 1" awards. They usually have different terms, but I think it's typical to get up to 100k for 4 months. After your demo you can apply for Phase 2 which is more money over a longer term, after that you can move to Phase 3, commercialization, etc.

The problem is that you have to work on it "full time" or at least the principal investigator has to work full time. The other problem is that they give you the topics of interest. There are so many over all of the departments. The biggest are definitely HHS and DoD. There are a lot of ML/AI, IT, sensors, etc.

Unfortunately, the current cycle mostly ends tomorrow for DoD.

[0][https://www.sbir.gov/node/1620805](https://www.sbir.gov/node/1620805)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER112> How about visible light based communication systems? With all the regulations around how radiowave spectrum can be used, the much higher spectrum bandwidth offering by visible light seems more promising as 5G, IoT and autonomous driving hardware evolves?

[https://youtu.be/UulEFh8yhCg](https://youtu.be/UulEFh8yhCg)

</comment><comment><USER113> Don't ask this question here, people here who know what is promising won't tell you because that's too valuable information.

Ask your children if you have any. They will be able to tell you.

<comment><USER114> Not really, julien.

If Sergey Brin had told you back in 1998 that he planned to start Google, and to start indexing the web out of his garage, it would not have meant anything. Or if the Wright Brothers had confided in you that they planned to build a workable flying machine back in 1903, they would not have been running any great risk either.

What's valuable is having the vision, and the ability to connect all the little dots, and to see exactly _why_ something is a good proposition. Just hearing that something will be great usually won't help you a lot.

To quote Howard H. Aiken:

"Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats."

</comment></comment><comment><USER115> It seems like there's a lot of profit in synthesizing existing technonogies, like decades old tech and new stuff (bitcoin, uber, neural nets + GPUs). And also overlooked are dying industries. They tend to consolidate on their way down, which allows a new competitor to buy them up. A lot of software is changing its business and pricing model, so it would allow a smaller firm to offer up an alternative to what established players are doing. Software used to be the big next thing where everything and anything was new and innovative. People got used to thinking of it in those terms and now fail to see it as the established industry it is, chasing high risk investments that aren't even going to be that high reward. There may not be a next Google, Facebook, or Amazon. You may have to look for another industry entirely if you want to get in early to become an industry giant.

</comment><comment><USER116> Find a popular web app. Make a privacy-centric version of it. Features publicly listed on the home page:

\- No 3rd party analytics

\- No 3rd party data sharing

\- GDPR for users worldwide

\- Logs deleted after x days

\- Clear data retention policies

\- Clear process on how to communicate change on these features

Apple, Firefox, and others have started to realize that people are now taking privacy seriously and willing to pay a premium for it. And, no, security is not a acceptable form of privacy. We should not be complacent with "Trust us" platforms with out clear definitions.

</comment><comment><USER117> What I'm going to say is a little different to most others on this board.

I'm an environmental economist - quite a specialised field. I work with a team of software developers to embed environmental economic knowledge systems in software, which makes those knowledge systems scalable and accessible. It's been quite an experience to lay down that knowledge - basically my life's work -in a way which democratises its use.

This experience gives me the sense that what a developer could do is look for an expert in a field in which they are interested. The more niche the better, and partner to build a system which embeds in IT a knowledge system. I might also add that many of today's big challenges cannot be solved from within one field of expertise, but instead require multi-disciplinary toolkits, which can also be be developed within IT systems.

<comment><USER118> Are you willing to share an example of the embedded environmental economic knowledge system you mention? I'm having a hard time understanding what that means?

<comment><USER117> Sure - check out ecosystemequity.com and follow links from there. Amongst other projects - a core banking system that integrates natural capital values into credit decisions. Sorry the umbrella website is a bit rough at the moment, it's just a placeholder for a short while.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER119> Real-time communications.

There's a hell of a lot more to building and scaling voice and video than you think, and tons more parts of the world are going to "come more online" with higher-bandwidth telecommunications access in the coming decades.

</comment><comment><USER120> AI-driven drug discovery.

New pharmaceuticals are immensely expensive to develop, but that's largely because pharma companies aren't using available data to its full potential.

Its never been easier to start a software business, which is bad for most software companies since it means that they'll have no opportunity to create monopolies.

AI-driven pharma companies are defensible since their work is much more patentable than a typical software-enabled business, and because they'll benefit from data network-effects in the long term.

</comment><comment><USER121> Any "problem" area is promising since you can help to find a solution to it. If you're flexible and problem-solving oriented, you'll always find yourself involved in interesting projects.

One example: before we had a lack of access to information, now we have too much information to deal with and have a lack of tools to sort out unbiased objective information from the rest.

Finding new tools of thought to help society raising its average IQ and EQ might be the highest-leverage activity I can think of.

</comment><comment><USER122> Process Automation / Business Rule Optimization is a nearly untouched field for large, existing software driven companies.

For goal N, where N is an amalgam of small processes, what can we do to isolate, automate, and optimize the process?

Everyone is hyper focused on generic ML solutions, but there's it has been a hell of a lot easier to hand-code solutions to problems in existing mid-to- large scale businesses that are looking to alleviate a process pain point. If you have the brains to determine some basic ROI ballparks, you can make back engineering hours fast if you can either increase the output of your business, or decrease the required people to accomplish that output.

There's some fields that touch upon this, like Dev-Ops, but this is a more strict definition of 'operations', in that I'm referring to the non-technical people.

The impact of this practice is amplified by two major factors; 1\. Quantity of work 3\. Difficulty of work

If you have high quantity of N, small optimizations are compounded across all the work centers. If you have highly difficult work, reducing the time it takes to 'handle' or 'create' output can be reduced.

This idea ties in to a fantastic book, 'The Goal' by Eliyahu M. Goldratt.

Being in 'hot tech' is cool, but mastering old concepts is valuable to businesses rigid to change. As the number of established companies that leverage tech for a majority of their work grows, the need for brains that are capable of process improvement with a scalpel, rather than a chainsaw.

</comment><comment><USER123> Improving validation and interpretation of DL.

For all the leaps forward in NN models, I have a feeling it's at risk because of a lack of trust. It's potential may be limited if the public perceives it to be too brittle or maladaptive.

DARPA is currently trying to work on DL models that are truly interpretable. If that gets sufficient progress I think the public/regulators will be much more willing to let software control aspects of their lives than a black box

<comment><USER124> what does DL stand for?

<comment><USER125> deep learning

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER126> An alternative for alcohol that is as attractive from the point of view of intoxication quality but is easily and quickly reversible and has little hangover.

<comment><USER127> legalized weed?

<comment><USER126> You find that easily and quickly reversible?? :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER128> Crypto! 17% of the worlds GDP is spent on financial services. Software can eat it all.

<comment><USER129> crypto is fake money, and it will never survive government scrutiny.

we need our dollars to be made by governments, not basement dwellers.

<comment><USER4> All money is fake money, the notion of a currency is a value fiction shared among a group of people.

Most governments are very young, and do not last very long historically. Central banking is a handful of decades old, cryptocurrency is one decade old.

Neither the maximalists nor deniers are right at this point. It remains to be seen when/whether cryptocurrency will replace fiat currency.

<comment><USER129> cryptocurrency will never replace gold-backed fiat currency.

<comment><USER130> "The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in 'Metcalfe's law' becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's." - Paul Krugman

<comment><USER129> Paul Krugman - the original stable genius

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER131> I think the transition from plastics will be vital. It will require new innovations in product manufacturing alternatives. Look around everything is made from it. It will change supply chains, goods lifecycles, costs, and consumer habits. For example, if a grocery store existed that didn't use plastics (in mass) for selling goods, what would that look like? Can it scale? Is it basically a farmers market, etc.

<comment><USER12> You'd probably see a lot of things packaged in paper, metal (foils, cans), and/or glass. So the follow-up question here would be "how do we sustainably produce paper/metal/glass packaging?", its own follow-up in turn being "how do we sustainably produce paper/metal/glass _anything_?".

Paper can be answered with some alternative pulp sources, e.g. bamboo and sugarcane. Recycling of existing paper products, as well as an emphasis on tree farms and wildfire prevention, also help here.

Metal and glass can be answered with recycling. Aluminum is pretty common for consumer packaging, and both aluminum and glass are pretty favorable to recycling (at a fraction of the energy cost of mining and smelting new materials).

</comment></comment><comment><USER132> If you're looking for (1) area w/lots of users (2) few producers and (3) likely involves software, I'd consider human computer interfaces w/the goal of making technology more integral and natural for more of us to leverage to more significant and healthy effect.

\- voice \- augmented reality \- abstraction atop all remote controls \- something next beyond the rectangular brick mobile phone \- etc

$.02. Great thread to start up!

</comment><comment><USER133> Graph/Network Representation Learning/Embedding: [https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=8395024](https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=8395024)

[https://github.com/chihming/awesome-network- embedding](https://github.com/chihming/awesome-network-embedding)

</comment><comment><USER134> A meta-aspect:

\- hot areas will attract a lot of producers, so go for the boring areas (who would have guessed analyzing logs would be such an important issue?).

\- Consider the essay by Chris Dixon posted here a couple of days ago that these days most big innovations start as "toys". So if you can start with something small and easy to use you may be able to get airborne.

</comment><comment><USER135> possibly Behavior-driven code generation... meaning create some platform to enable watching users use an application, then it could make machine code to create a similar application. This would enable making videos for training that simulated a working application but the AI would not care if the application worked or not in reality but could make it work type thing?

<comment><USER136> Are you talking about [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_by_example](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_by_example) ?

<comment><USER135> Yah I think so maybe like that but more in a way that it was setup for existing workflows in that marketing people could actually create some video mockup demonstration then an AI could look at that video then produce a working product from it, similar to how a developer would. But this is shooting developers in the foot obviously as those that are not AI programmers would be screwed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER137> Gestalt, context-aware UI.

We have a lot of different ways to interact with systems but they are all separate and relatively dumb (not context-aware). I think there is a confluence of forces that will lead to a more seamless user interaction with and between systems that will reduce the friction between app and user, app and app, and user to user. Eventually, for better or worse, a lot of the underlying differences between apps and data and modes of interactions will largely disappear to the end user.

Voice commands, AR, gesture recognition, traditional mouse and keyboard, wearables, powerful phones, laptops, bluetooth, environmental devices, smart- speakers, cloud-based microservices, data transfer and description standards, ad hoc contexts, ubiquitous fast internet, etc, coming together to have user and app interaction happen in a smooth, natural , and intelligent way. Machine learning will be at the heart of it all.

Imagine all of the progress made over the years in app-to-app interoperability jumping into meatspace.

</comment><comment><USER138> Somebody finish automating the closing papers for real estate deals. Yes, you can sign contracts on line. Yes, it's probably a very good idea to have the final papers notarized and witnessed in-person by neutral humans. What I'm after is the $35 after-the-fact FedEx charge for overnight delivery of the NOW-VALID papers. That's your low hanging fruit target.

</comment><comment><USER139> I am a firm believer in the esports and gaming industry overall. That is why I created Mascot Logo Maker ([https://mascotlogomaker.com/](https://mascotlogomaker.com/)). If you like video games and do not mind putting in a little bit of work I think it can pay off big time gg.

</comment><comment><USER140> Computer Security. Lots of software and hardware is getting shipped everyday and all of it is full of vulnerabilities.

</comment><comment><USER141> The next big wave (in that this is already happening) is that of mass job displacement due to automation in every industry that has routine predictable work from the fast food industry, retail, transportation, legal, administrative and clerical work, routine data entry.

</comment><comment> 1-6 Graphical Programming - You have an ever increasing number of people needing to perform computational tasks but lack education in coding. As WYSIWYG/GUI transformed personal computers, the GUI will eventually transform the way we program as well.

<comment><USER142> This exists, it's called LabVIEW. I make a money by replacing horrible LabVIEW-based systems with nice text-based ones (Python / C / whatever- all are better than LabVIEW).

LabVIEW is ok if your virtual instrument fits on one screen. Anything larger and you are better off using a conventional programming language.

So here is one program with graphical programming: how do you make it compatible with GIT / source control? I'm not saying it's impossible, but I am saying it's not easy. [There is a 3d CAD system called OnShape that does it].

<comment><USER143> I don't know LabVIEW, but I can see how a naive or even a somewhat informed attempt at something like that could lead to, ahem, suboptimal results.

I guess you could, in principle, replace text-based code with visual diagrams, but the essential requirement for logical rigor would remain. That's just part of the essential complexity in software.

Replacing code with visual diagrams might make things easier for some people since understanding strict logical rigor and the ability to write code aren't the same thing, but in the end I don't think the difficult part of programming is actually learning to write code.

I'm also not sure at all that you'd get very good productivity setting all those details right in the diagram through a GUI unless the interface were really well designed, with a liberal employment of keyboard shortcuts. GUIs are faster than CLIs at many things, but I'm not sure setting programming- level details is one of those. You'd probably need to employ keyboard shortcuts or something similar quite liberally, and learning those well wouldn't be too far from learning to write the code.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER144> Smart assistant in some narrow field of knowledge.

</comment><comment><USER145> Security and privacy. Demand for security folks is white-hot right now, and the need for better security products continues to grow.

I've been seeing a lot of companies in adjacent spaces making headway into the security domain as well—ML assisted intrusion detection and cloud-centric security tooling come to mind.

In a broader sense, I think more governments and regulatory bodies are starting to take cybersecurity much more seriously than they did in the past. GDPR and CCPA are likely the tip of the iceburg in coming year and—regulations aside—I think there is a real and pressing need for better privacy and protection in both consumer and enterprise contexts.

<comment><USER146> This is the most "for sure" answer in this thread. If I had to bet on any one of these answers being true, this is the answer I would bet on.

Security has always been a big deal, but in light of all the attacks we're seeing lately, there's likely going to be REGULATIONS involved, that may mean demand for these jobs skyrockets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER147> I think streaming is up and coming.

The problem is I'm not sure how big the market can grow or the upper bound of it.

People are making software for streamers out there but at the same time there is only so much money. All streamers are at the mercy of subscribers.

The two software that stand out are statistic/dashboard and the other is bots. As for hardware the only one that stands out is irl streaming, it's a backpack with a day worth of battery and 4 mobile data plan for high quality streaming.

I personally feel like it's a gold rush like the mobile app early days before it got saturated (remember flappy bird?). But I think the market is much smaller.

</comment><comment><USER148> Folks have many good ideas here, but most of them require high upfront capital... Not something a regular person can afford. The good thing about software or internet in general is that the barrier of entry is lower.

</comment><comment><USER149> People are all talking about niches over here. Work on fundamentals. Strong fundamentals are an investment that pays dividends. If you want to learn something niche like ML, because you think it's gonna be big, then learn the math and calculus and stats that underlies the ML. Then if ML really becomes something most devs should know, you'll be able to pick it up better than the people who have to only get the surface. And if it doesn't, you'll have a strong foundation for other things, which is great because foundations are by definition broad.

<comment><USER150> Absolutely this. Linear algebra has been the gift that has kept on giving since the 1800s underpinning everything from quantum mechanics to video games.

Unlike most mathematics where you quickly hit a usefulness ceiling, the more linear algebra you learn the more useful it gets - linear algebra is just such a rich subject that there's an ocean of useful things to learn and apply.

</comment></comment><comment><USER151> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High- frequency_trading](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-frequency_trading) is pretty cool for introverts

</comment><comment><USER152> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_emerging_technologies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_emerging_technologies)

</comment><comment><USER153> [https://trennd.co](https://trennd.co) is a service that specialises in uncovering new trends. Maybe you'll find something there.

</comment><comment><USER154> I think there are a lot of areas as the most promising

1\. Digital Twin(s) -- Soon all people all around the world will have two worlds, one real and one virtual The virtual world would be like the next generation of Minecraft and people all around the world will work together on open-source projects, like what people do on Github but in a virtual n-Dimensional world

2\. AI and Biotech --> See Yuval Noah Harari lectures on Youtube

3\. Climate Change related activities

4\. Fusion which is the next generation of renewable energy

</comment><comment><USER155> Real time raytracing

<comment><USER156> Can you elaborate? I'm not familiar with the current state of graphics research. Can a high end GPU today do this, and if not, how far are the fastest high-quality algorithms from realtime today?

<comment><USER155> A high end GPU today (like GTX 10 series) can absolutely stun! Check this out,

[http://www.realtimerendering.com/raytracinggems/unofficial_R...](http://www.realtimerendering.com/raytracinggems/unofficial_RayTracingGems_v1.6.pdf) [33MB PDF]

It sheds light on some ray tracing techniques with the focus on the new RTX API with DirectX12

Real time rendering portal page generally my goto for checking out new stuff in graphics and now they have a Raytracing section [https://www.realtimerendering.com/raytracing.html](https://www.realtimerendering.com/raytracing.html)

I am on phone right now, and will try to put more material as soon as I get back to my workstation!

Edit: Courtesy Onion2k

<comment><USER157> Note to users on mobile - link is a 33mb pdf.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER158> Yourself.

One of the most complex areas, having lots of users, that need to be fixed, is human beings. Spend all your time to know who you are, why you are like that, and change this world starting from the most promising thing it has on it: you.

In the meantime, try to carry out activities that you like (ride your bike, walk alone or with real people). Do it disconnected from any device or social network.

Do things that make you feel real and unique, without layout, template, guidelines, best practices. Ignore any negativism (fortunately you are introverted, it should help). Recognize in every moment that you have to learn a lot. Learn a lot and repeat.

<comment><USER159> Hey. I am 22 (from India), suffering from depression and with zero skills which can get me a job. I have wasted last 4-5 years without doing anything or learning anything. All i do is sleep, laying on bed and daydream through out the day. Can you tell me how should i go about improving my life?

<comment><USER160> Have you seeked medical professional help?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER161> Human in the loop machine learning. All the successful big players use it, but pretend it is all ML. Merely making the human explicit and finding the best trade-off between human and algorithm can do wonders for machine learning.

Plus it has better optics than "AI WILL EAT YER JORBZ". In this case human in the loop ML inherently creates jobs as an essential element.

<comment><USER162> Not a bad suggestion, but are the optics really that much better? Definitely gives me a dystopian vibe of "paying humans pennies to help AI automate away what few other jobs they have left to them".

<comment><USER161> Depends where the humans live. Some areas of the world this is great work: good pay and safe work conditions.

Also depends on whether there is a limit to this work. It seems there is plenty to go around given the enormous amount of training data ML needs.

And as ML becomes more widespread the value of this work will increase and pay will go up.

Also, the current paradigm is a simple active learning approach. There may be a large variety of ways humans can contribute at various skill and hence pay levels. E.g. compare the work of original 'computers' to today's enormously well paid software developers. As one example consider the FoldIt protein folding game, which was very successful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER163> I worked in Unified communications for many years and is a very well established and solid technology with protocols like SIP, RTP, sRTP and webRTC as we move to space and that area is growing, inter space communications Is an interesting are to work on. How to transmit via other media (radio, light) to be able to communicate across the solar system

</comment><comment><USER164> I think the alt credentialing space is extremely promising: that is, anything that solves the problem for employers "How do I know that this person is better than anyone else in the world at this problem set I need?" Without the usual leaps of faith and logic necessary to think a Harvard degree means that.

</comment><comment><USER165> Probably agriculture. There is an opinion that food will become much more valuable and rare than it is today.

</comment><comment><USER166> Geriatric care and home health services.

</comment><comment><USER28> While this thread is still popular, I would like to see some renewed innovation in "management science", as in, how to set up a large modern organization for sustainable success. Like, install an app and just follow the plan. No more management shakeups and genius dear leaders.

</comment><comment><USER167> Whatever area you're interested in. Whatever it is, if you love it enough, it's got promise.

</comment><comment><USER168> May be this will help

Gartner Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2020

[https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/gartner- top-10-st...](https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/gartner- top-10-strategic-technology-trends-for-2020/)

</comment><comment><USER169> Whatever is needed. At this point in time, it would be areas like clean energy for the whole planet, digitizing governance, helping people keep fit and healthy, growing nutritious food, population control, conserving forests and staying out of the way of mother nature.

</comment><comment><USER170> Before facebook, there was myspace, before iphone we had java phones and winphones, before twitch there was chatroulette, etc.

Remember that it's very hard to notice a « disruption » is taking place, because at the time it looks like just an evolution of something already existing.

</comment><comment><USER171> About time for a new social network.

<comment><USER172> Whats the killer feature that's missing from social networks right now that a 15 year old would care about?

</comment></comment><comment><USER96> Not tech for tech's sake, but the only thing that is going to matter soon enough is climate change mitigation. So of course there will lots of tech involved.

Perhaps something that touches all of it and could be lucrative is data collection and analysis tools.

</comment><comment><USER173> Anything that reduces last mile shipping time. Drones route planning planning platforms, personnel allocation software, Smart fridges/locks. Big retailers are racing to <1 day shipping and buying fairly untested tools to try to get there.

<comment><USER174> Can you give an example of an untested tool you have in mind?

<comment><USER173> I'm mostly thinking of in home delivery for e-commerce. There was a company called Latch that was acquired that was more or less a smart lock for this purpose. You can see fairly regular news stories of Walmart/Amazon attempting this sort of thing. I believe amazon has some way to put items in the trunk of your car, but I don''t have a link handy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER175> Make a new Podcast?

</comment><comment><USER176> This radar, motion-detection UX from Google [https://atap.google.com/soli/](https://atap.google.com/soli/)

Don't be fooled by the toyness of it now. The potential for this is amazing.

</comment><comment><USER177> Differential privacy. Solving some of the analytics use cases for businesses that currently involve invasive tracking that browser makers are making unviable. Continue to solve the important use cases while respecting privacy.

</comment><comment><USER178> I've played with devices all my career. It's always had some traction, but I wouldn't call it The Big One.

I tend to program for the love of the art; not to get rich, which I guess makes me a heretic, but there you are...

</comment><comment><USER179> Productized services :) People want the "job done" more and more and that is going to apply to many more services, mostly enabled by tech!

I am also running a pretty growing community on that on FB (Productized Startups)

</comment><comment><USER180> IOT blockchain AI running in the cloud with integrated cryptocurrency and ICO.

<comment><USER181> We have a buzzword BINGO!

</comment></comment><comment><USER182> Personal coaching services to people looking for a different area to work in?

</comment><comment><USER183> Techs for the environment, like wireless sensor grids used to monitor and help the nature, or monitor warehouses, ports

Now sensors can run nodejs or similar familiar languages, and with more capacities than a decade ago

</comment><comment><USER184> Hypnosis for HCI. (Neuralink et. al. are looking through the wrong end of the telescope. When you want to connect a computer and a brain the most effective thing to do is program the brain.)

<comment><USER172> Could you elaborate please?

<comment><USER184> Yes. All year. And thank you for asking. :)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20746802](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20746802)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20601806](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20601806)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20434897](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20434897)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18564989](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18564989)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18565101](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18565101)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER185> Automating manufacturing supply chains. I am sure it is possible to build a profitable business in this space extremely quickly. If I wasn't already committed, I'd do it myself.

</comment><comment> d--b Just a quick comment here:

In scale, mobile apps in 2010 and vlogging in 2014 are nothing like social media in 2004.

You can compare social media in 2004 to web searching in 1998 if you know what I mean...

</comment><comment><USER186> Deep learning. Unlike Crypto, actual companies are actually implementing it for real non-illegal uses cases, like camera Night Mode, translation, self- driving cars.

</comment><comment><USER187> Some people predict that fixing stuff will become a big business. As resource and energy get more scarce, there will be more incentive to fix existing stuff.

</comment><comment><USER188> Anything that goes from Zero to 1 (Peter Thiel). An example, pre-airplane civilization to a jet set civilization. I'd say that in 2016, that was the year for ML to seriously influence world events. In 2019 I'd give a serious look at this list [https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs](https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs) and chances are the next big thing isn't on it. Personally, I'm shorting credit card companies since 50% of millennials have maxed out credit cards.

</comment><comment><USER189> Lab-grown meat ordering page. Hyperloop ticket sales website. Daily personal diet recipe. Group consensus platform. Factual information sharing

</comment><comment><USER190> Recycling, the worlds needs to reuse materials to prevent climate change. You will make the world a better place by working in this field.

</comment><comment><USER191> As we trend towards full automation, both manufacturing and distribution jobs are likely to be structurally disintegrated. Services will probably also be rendered obsolete, aside from highly personal / human / creative services that rest on the long-tail of AI. So a more realistic prediction might suggest that the majority of "promising areas" will lie in fields like AI, big data, statistics, decentralization, advanced mathematics, etc. The character and arrangement of these domains will depend largely on whether we continue a trajectory of capitalism focused on profits, or whether we begin a shift towards socialism and co-op models that focus on psychosocial and environmental value.

Profit path = more advanced big data and exploitative mechanisms, psy-ops tooling for political power preservation, centralized power, etc (think robocop / cambridge analytica on steroids). Psychosocial path = more innovation rooted in positive psychology, complex systems, decentralization, and facilitating self-actualization (think Her / pragmatic utopia). The overlap between the two seems to be psychology and complex systems thinking, so maybe "complex systems psychology" or even "social engineering" would be solid candidates?

Complex systems psychology would essentially be the next evolution of behavioral economics, where we observe and engineer the emergence of system- level phenomena by motivating individual agents to behave in ways that are psychologically positive (or aligned with a profit/power motif of someone atop a hierarchy) for the individual parts and the whole.

Social engineering is just more the micro version of that - figuring out how to infiltrate / manipulate complex social systems and then equipping organizations with defense tactics and tooling. Maybe even anticipating the emergence of new attack vectors before they can be exploited.

For anyone interested in complex systems, Santa Fe Institute is in the middle of Week 3 of their free online course. Highly recommended.

For anyone interested in positive psychology, Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow are great places to start.

For anyone interested in social engineering, the SECTF is a goldmine.

</comment><comment><USER192> Automated the shit out of a customer service process. Current doing contract work doing the same thing. It pays bills.

</comment><comment><USER193> Gene editing tech. CRISPR is only the beginning and the payoffs for getting all this right are potentially heroic.

</comment><comment><USER194> Ironically, I think the replies in this thread show how the importance of problems can be very subjective.

</comment><comment><USER195> I suspect online learning - especially through established universities - <USER3> ready to grow in a big way.

</comment><comment><USER196> Computing shifting to the background. (Ubiquitous sensors plus Cloud based AI anticipating our needs)

</comment><comment><USER197> Event sourcing. See dataintensive.net

TL;DR - rip the writeahead log out of databases and materialize not just SQL commands but events yourself, returning control to reality rather than systems.

<comment><USER198> I think in the same lines (I'm building a relational lang [http://tablam.org](http://tablam.org)) and think a modern RDBMS could be made alike:

        command  "city.define miami" |> event pre-process (ie: validations and transformations!) |> write-ahead log |> fire-observers: [post log for later OR block writes]

The idea is to put some of the stored procedures in the "event pre-process" before commit to write-ahead. In the "fire-observers" steps is possible to directly commit to a table (sync) and get immediate feedback (ie: primary key duplicate) OR store the log to be processed later.

The idea is that is possible to send "events" that are not necessarily "insert into table" or similar, just pure business stuff. BUT still possible to operate as always!

<comment><USER199> Not sure if this is what you mean but these exist - Oracle Queues, MQSeries, RabbitMQ (open source MQSeries copy), all part of a generic thing called Enterprise Service Bus

<comment><USER197> I would suggest thinking more along the lines of Kafka/Kinesis/et cetera. ESBs are often not persistent and as a result not available for reprocessing against new use cases or with fixed code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER200> > vlogging in 2014

Not quite sure I understand this. Is this a US thing? Is it blogging by posting videos?

<comment><USER201> Think YouTube stars

</comment></comment><comment><USER202> Gaming on the cloud. VR and AR.

<comment><USER203> Still white elephants after decades. Every few years someone tries to stream games, it doesn't work.

The closest example right this moment is Microsoft's flight sim that'll download world data from bing maps as you fly around. Simply because they are using synthesized petabytes of map data. Guildwars and other mmo's download world data as you are playing to fill out areas you will visit in the future. It still uses a traditional game client and business model. There's a slew of games that run on nearly every bit of hardware. I don't see the advantage cloud gaming brings.

You could stream every mobile game that's existed as low latency is rarely a requirement for those games. Those games are still downloaded to memory and rendered on the client and use a conventional business model.

Vr is getting a valve style game soon that might well be a killer app for it, but the problem of movement remains.

</comment></comment><comment><USER204> Technology for post collapse

</comment><comment><USER205> Home meal prep. I think there's an opportunity for someone to nail this, just nobody has. I'd love somewhere to create a schedule, dietary preferences, family size, and have a fresh, healthy, varied meal delivered every day, without having to think about it again.

<comment><USER206> What do you think is missing from current options, because an awful lot of podcasts have ads for these right now. Freshly comes to mind as a brand I would recognize, but I've definitely heard multiple services advertizing that you can customize to your schedule, number of mouths to feed, dietary preferences (common sensitivities, kosher / halal, veg*, etc.)

<comment><USER205> Huh. Maybe nothing and I'm just behind the times. Will check it out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER207> how about something around electric vehicles, especially in the developing world where it's a very hot topic. I am not saying develop an EV, but some info product or EV specific store.

</comment><comment><USER208> Quick control-f tells me no one has said "Environment" or a phrase I'm hoping catches on "Green-tech". There's just no way this doesn't blow up into something big in my mind. Earlier today i was discussing with a biologist friend how there should be a better partnership between the environmental world and the tech world, citing examples of biologists learning to code v's focusing on what they're good at. The environmental fields have not paid well historically, but i have a feeling that if the climate is changing, eventually it'll start paying very well to attract the people it needs.

Stop optimizing driving routes for food delivery, selling CPG products to poor people...start worrying about humanity! It may not pay amazingly, but at least you're doing something that has the potential to be looked back at as important as fighting Nazi Germany or Polio.

<comment><USER209> > but i have a feeling that if the climate is changing, eventually it'll start > paying very well to attract the people it needs

The problem is that it's a tragedy of the commons, so no matter how important it gets, unless governments really start putting money towards it there will continue to be little interest from the private sector.

<comment><USER210> no disrespect intended at all, but this seems to capture a very non-tech ethos. as an industry we need to have boundless optimism and practice a philosophy of idealism with a healthy sprinkle of realism. we are very well positioned to solve sustainability problems/change culture

<comment><USER209> I think I partly misread the original post and thought they were looking for a lucrative new field of work; if they just want something worthwhile to put effort into, then I can see how my comment might've come off as cynical. That wasn't my intent.

I'm not saying nothing can be done about our environmental problems, just that it'd be tough to turn it into a career. Unfortunately.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER211> Autonomous Driving

AR / VR

Automation generally but particularly in manufacturing

3D printing for manufacturing

<comment><USER212> 3D printing for manufacturing has now been rebranded "additive manufacturing" (kinda a less descriptive term if you ask me — sounds like making glue — but it is what it is)

</comment></comment><comment><USER213> COBOL programming?

<comment><USER83> COBOL.js++ with qubit edge-cloud blockchain microservices

</comment></comment><comment><USER214> My two cents:

\- Privacy-focuses/Decentralized social networks

\- E-Sports

\- Food & Leisure

\- Travel

\- Climate-friendly services

</comment><comment><USER215> Privacy & Personal Analytics

I am working on an open-source implementation that is based on the fundamental idea of privacy. The consumers should have full control eventually.

For now only Google etc have all the information on us, but the great thing is that because of GDPR we see a move towards us being able to download it.

The system I am building allows us to combine data from across companies. This is huge. We are talking so much opportunity. The real challenge is making it easy for people to onboard while still providing security.

Feel free to contact me if you're more interested.

</comment><comment><USER216> Virtual Reality.

If you're reading this and you haven't tried VR yet - I can't recommend it highly enough. Particularly a higher end experience connected to a PC with tracking (HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, or Valve Index). The lower end ones like a gear VR are fun and novel but it just isn't the same experience.

I have introduced dozens of people to VR for the first and you just can't explain it to people. Videos are no help. Trying to describe is better than nothing I guess but it just doesn't get you there. If you take anything away from this comment it would be to just try to find somewhere that you can try VR yourself and you'll understand what I'm about to say better than I could ever explain it.

The equipment available to consumers today is pretty low end compared to what is possible with prototypes / commercial systems when it comes to resolution, framerate, and other factors. There are also quality of life features that work but haven't been brought to market yet for consumers. Things like wireless for the headsets. But even with this early days tech - when you put the headset on you feel like you are being transported to a different place.

If you've tried VR you probably know what I'm talking about. There is this distinct feeling of being present in the virtual world. Remembering places in VR feels more like remembering a physical location you've been to rather than something you saw in a computer game. And VR is going to be so much more than games.

Because of this feeling of presence - going places in VR actually feels like going to a different place. Likewise, when you meet someone in VR it feels different than meeting someone in a fourm like this or even in a voice chat in a video game. It feels closer to actually being in a room with them. I think a lot of this is related to being able to see some of their body language.

Everything in VR feels like a hacked together prototype and works like one too. I like to show VR to people but I can't really recommend it to most people because it just doesn't work well enough for them to be able to fix it when various things break or settings need to be changed. Some options that I offer to them are things like PSVR or I've heard the new Oculus Quest is pretty good as a casual experience but I haven't tried it yet. But both of those route you to walled gardens that are missing a lot of the really cool stuff.

If you know the right nooks and crannies to look there are some amazing things to see and do. I'll list a couple of my favorites but the best ones all have something in common. They are a platform that allow people to make their own content. In some cases they are made that way on purpose, others it feels more like an accident of design.

Remember when the internet was a little younger and you'd find a cool or bizarre website in an irc channel or something and think "who even made this?" Well that time is back except you can't view it through a screen anymore. You have to put on an HMD and venture directly into the internet. When you take a walk through the internet what do you find? Mostly weird stuff and brief glimpses of the future - both are worthwhile.

VRChat is probably the best example of the above. Like everything in VR the interfaces are terrible and everything half works. But even through that fog you start to get an idea of how deep this rabbit hole goes. In VRChat you choose an Avatar and then go to virtual worlds and meet people other people. They have default Avatars and Worlds to choose from but the best content is what people make themselves. It's a unity game and there is a shocking degree of freedom in what people can upload (content made with apps like blender or unity itself).

Copyright may as well not exist yet in VR because it's too new for anyone to know to look. So people decide to be various superheros or characters from all kinds of fiction. I once visited a world where you could choose from hundreds of Marvel and DC characters. It's not that in VRChat you can be Spiderman. It's that you can choose from dozens of spidermen from various comics and movies (the real spiderverse perhaps).

As you might expect there is a lot of anime. There are also a lot of unconventional avatars. Sometimes People choose to be a car. Or a firetruck. Or a toaster. Or an ATM Machine. Sometimes people choose to be something incredibly large like a robot towering hundreds of feet in the air. Sometimes people choose to be a tiny avatar like a mouse or an RC car.

The strange thing is that there is a sense of scale in VR. So if you are a giant robot, everyone looks small and you really do feel like you are that large. Likewise if you pick a tiny avatar everything in the world looks giant. This feeling of presence remains. A very present toaster.

For many users of VRChat the Avatars are the most compelling parts. Don't get me wrong, they are really cool. It's amazing to see some of the things that people come up with. Especially the avatars that have some sort of animation without it being obnoxious / trolling (hey I did say we were walking into the internet here). People spend hours creating these versions of their virtual selves and build in abilities to do things in game. Most of these things just boil down to character animations or sounds. Any animation or sound you want leaves a lot of room for creativity (with few limits on size, or unfortunately volume).

But to me this isn't the real draw of VRChat. The worlds are. You can look at the most popular worlds in the game in menu but I prefer the search bar (searching is one of the things that half works.) Being able to be some character from fiction or someones imagination is one thing - but being able to travel somewhere is another thing all together.

So you may find yourself in a VR bar or arcade having a conversation when someone drops a portal to another world. Some of my favorites I've been to include a recreation of the secret base containing the Stargate from the show by the same name. Once you're there you can dial the gate and walk through to find yourself walking out of a pyramid on a desert planet called Abydos. Or you may find yourself climbing into a helicopter with friends in a world of abstract and surrealist art created to go along with an album somebody made. A sort of VR music video that you can fly through to a soundtrack. Or if a helicopter doesn't suit you how about another world where you can put on a jetpack and fly through what feels like various settings on an old media player visualizer (avoid this one if you get motion sickness!). Or how about one of those rides from a theme park where they put you in a hydraulic car that doesn't move and project a "ride" onto the screen in front of you? Because yes, somehow people have put a couple of these in VR too (I like the Back To The Future one).

There are literally thousands of these worlds you can visit. It really reminds me of the old internet where you would find these amazing little things tucked away and hidden.

The community is probably closer to today's internet as far as signal to noise ratio goes. But if you're willing to look there are definitely kind and interesting people to meet as well.

VRChat is fun and interesting but it's actually not where I spend most of my time in VR.

In VR there are maybe a dozen first person shooter games to choose from. In VR shooter games kind of feel like a mix between a game and paintball or something like that. My favorite is called Pavlov VR. It is a shameless knock off of counter-strike (I mean shameless. Down to the same exact same guns, mechanics, and win conditions.) But thats ok! Because it means you can play counter-strike in VR. Which is incredibly fun. There are also Call of Duty clones, Battlefield clones, and Battle Royale games. But what makes pavlov so special is that you can upload maps, similar to VRChat. Just like VRChat it's boundless creativity.

So in addition to having all the same mechanics as counter-strike it also has all the same maps. I've been playing Dust II for years (not as long as some, never did play 1.6). But now I get to actually run around there. Same goes for maps from a lot of other games I used to play. In addition to people uploading maps they also turn them into these custom game modes that you can instantly play just by joining or starting a server. Because of this, Pavlov winds up feeling like lots of different games. There are the classic default modes but there are also lots of other game modes to try (zombies, duel servers, conversions for weapons). Some of the coop modes are fun because they are a more social experience like VRChat but there is more to do. VRChat can wind up a little boring just standing around sometimes.

<comment><USER217> Do you have a link to a recommended parts list? Or a recommendation for somewhere I could go in/near SF to try it without purchasing my own parts. You have me interested. It would be great to experience something similar to the late 90s internet again.

<comment><USER216> For parts you basically want a high end gaming PC[0] + a Valve Index.

SF is probably a great place to find VR Arcades. Googling it looks like there are a couple here is one[1].

Might be better to ask / google around and see which ones have the best reviews.

edit: this one looks good too[2]

[0] [https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapcforme/comments/dfpwr0/1000_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapcforme/comments/dfpwr0/1000_1200_usd_valve_index_vr_build/)

[1] [https://sandboxvr.com/sanfrancisco/](https://sandboxvr.com/sanfrancisco/)

[2] [https://www.theherohangout.com](https://www.theherohangout.com)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER218> Law

<comment><USER219> Seconded

</comment></comment><comment><USER220> Probably image processing.

</comment><comment><USER221> podcasts, virtual reality, deep fake detection, diy internet

</comment><comment><USER222> Carbon capture and storage.

Space mining.

Biohacking.

</comment><comment><USER223> Lightning Network

</comment><comment><USER224> Making GDPR and CCPA compliance easy for developers

</comment><comment><USER225> online gaming / esports

</comment><comment><USER226> Here are my opinions:

* AI and ML. Assuming Moore's law still holds in some capacity, it will be about 10 years before we have a $1000 machine that is within shooting distance of the computational power of the human brain.

* Solar. Prices are dropping exponentially which means power will become cheaper and open up whole new industries. Solar just dropped below coal and is halving about every two years. The first obvious market is solar for housing but there could be plenty of others.

* Battery technology. Hand in hand with solar, battery technology is getting better and the cost of battery power is dropping exponentially. All fields adjacent to battery technology, including power management, drones, autonomous vehicles, etc. will be bolstered by having bigger, cheaper batteries.

* DNA sequencing and synthesis. I don't think we've gotten past the $1000 whole genome sequencing number in the past couple of years, so we may be in a sequencing "winter" but this won't last and these prices will plummet exponentially. I don't have any big hope of private enterprises offering personalized health as incentives don't align and the barrier is high, so my opinion is that projects that do 'crowd sourcing' with a focus open data and open source have a higher chance of success (see OpenSNP, OpenHumans, Personal Genome Project (PGP)). How is health care transformed when I can ask 1000 other people who have the same liver enzymes whether the drug I'm considering taking has worked for them? How about when I correlate the relevant gene sequence and environmental exposure to get insight on my probability of getting some specific type of cancer?

* Cryptocurrency. Bitcoin gets a lot of hate on this community but it's been steadily appreciating in value and is the only alternative to a centralized currency. At one point during the heydays of the 2000s when the internet was just burgeoning, 'micro payments' were floated around as a way to monetize. I don't see any other alternative than something like Bitcoin or some other cryptocurrency.

* Ubiquitous computing. Maybe the most nebulous on this list, but consider what things look like when we have 1GHz, 4 core, 2G RAM, 4G hard drive Linux boxes for less than $1. Smart homes? Smart cars? Smart clothing? After playing around with a Raspberry Pi Zero W that's a full GHz processor, multi gigs of RAM and hard disk space with Linux running for less than $20, it's clear to me we're starting to transition to a next phase in 'personal' computing.

My own heavy bias is towards free/libre/open source and I firmly believe that "open source will eat the world", but this might be my hopefulness outweighing my perception of reality. I will say that anecdotally, projects that are FOSS may not have any greater chance of initial success but tend to have a greater success at staying relevant.

Obviously what you want to focus on will depend on what resources you have access to both socially or financially. I'm also not a successful entrepreneur so all these suggestions should be taken with a healthy dose of skepticism. I am surely going to be surprised by what new comes in the next ten years.

One final note is to keep on top of other technologies that might not look that promising but could grow into something bigger. I don't think laser cutting or 3D printing are all that promising in the short term even though I think they're cool. I also want to know more about FPGAs and VR even if their adoption might not be clear. The above list seems like it's pretty certain to be relevant in some capacity.

</comment><comment><USER224> Tooling to make GDPR and CCPA compliance easier for companies

</comment><comment><USER227> Others.

</comment><comment><USER224> GDPR and CCPA compliance

</comment><comment><USER228> I'm not convinced we're done with social networks, considering how many are shutting down, how many are privacy nightmares, and how many are failing to respond to user feedback.

</comment><comment><USER229> Take when someone streams on youtube - it is exactly that. Ability to stream video live, let your viewers chat amongst eachother + being able to receive donations. With Youtube becoming more Goolag than before, and because Youtube is actively becoming platfrom just like any other where they don't share profits with creators anymore, I storngly believe this is where it's going to be "at" for startups. I already looked into it and I believe the issue with large data storage and traffic is now solved with cheap hardware AND P2P streaming like bittorent and the js client for the web browser.

Then you can see that YT creators now rival TV - easily. So I believe the internet will transform in a way where an youtube channel will become something like a tv show or late night show or whatever TV equivalent from the past. People will be actively looking and subscribing to these individuals or shows on purpose and will be consuming them periodically like they did in the past with television. Hence video is the tech I'd look into and the concept of making good platform/s for creators and viewers to connect and interact(!).

Blogs are dead. FB is good only for groups(many people in one place with many interests can easily connect). Twitter is pure pollitical cancer. Instagram is just for worshipping attention whores..eh "models". Any non-mainstream social network became too singular because people who were kicked out form ms sn went there. So all in all, social networks are dead. But video, video is a medium that is too deeply rooted in humans for some reason. I guess the ease of consumption? So I stirngly believe that is the way to go. I mean, you have hundreds of streaming services nowadays...no one will be buying all of them. People still want to consume good content but TV is shite and these online stremaing service will become unafordable. So there will have to be alternatives for people and as I have mentioned, YT is cutting sharing of profits with creators(not to mention censorship), so these creators will be looking for alternative means of earning and creating and sharing.

(I didn't proof-read my response so sorry for typos, I type fast and don't have time for this)

</comment><comment><USER230> Digital privacy / security. People and companies are becoming more and more privacy aware/conscious/concerned. All the scandals (e.g. data breaches, targeted advertising, selling of user data) and new regulations such as GDPR are only increasing the need and demand for privacy

</comment><comment><USER231> ML on the edge.

<comment><USER232> What's "the edge"?

<comment><USER233> Edge might mean leaf-level IoT devices. Plenty are smart enough to do their own trending or anomaly detection (ie ML), for example, and only report to the cloud the results of that.

So you have edge, cloud, and you might also ponder the "fog", where there's an intermediate aggregation layer. Think leaf devices in some building (edge) with some medium smarts done on prem (fog) before clouding it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER234> AI/ML that involves self-programming systems. If you can crack that nut, you have the potential to be a centibillion/trillionaire.

</comment><comment><USER235> dWeb!

</comment><comment><USER236> Nice info

</comment><comment><USER237> Build the smallest OS possible that can run Kubernetes at scale in Rust

You've just deprecated Linux & C in the data center :-D

<comment><USER238> Although Kubernetes is for containers, so you'd also need to re-implement Linux in Rust.

<comment><USER237> Sorry, did the omission of a very detailed list of todos imply I don't know what this would entail?

You'd need to reimplement a variety of layers and could leave out of a lot too.

Personally a rudimentary BIOS type system in hardware that can read/write to an OS layer would be the design I'd start with

The OS doesn't need userland tooling then

But no one cares about the OS that powers everything being an archaic mess. Gotta fetishize where the profit is

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER239> The area of the Circle. I'm led to believe there's pie in there somewhere.

</comment><comment><USER240> Figure out a way to apply modern software automation to a root problem of society. For example, hunger.</comment>